Mauritian Creole Research Articles

Philip Baker and the Making of Mauritian Creole

Philip Baker and the Making of Mauritian Creole

Do gender and ethnic differences in fasting leptin in Indians and Creoles of Mauritius persist beyond differences in adiposity?

Recent body composition studies on the island of Mauritius in young adults belonging to the two main ethnicities-Indians (South Asian descent) and Creoles (African/Malagasy descent)-have shown gender-specific ethnic differences in their body mass index (BMI)-Fat% relationships. We investigated here whether potential gender and ethnic differences in blood leptin would persist beyond that explained by differences in body composition. In healthy young adult Mauritian Indians and Creoles (79 men and 80 women; BMI range: 15-41 kg m-2), we investigated the relationships between fasted serum leptin with BMI, waist circumference (WC), total fat% assessed by deuterium oxide dilution technique and central adiposity (trunk fat%) assessed by abdominal bioimpedance analysis. The results indicate that the greater elevations in leptin-BMI and leptin-WC regression lines in women compared with men, as well as in Indian men compared with Creole men, are abolished when BMI and WC are replaced by total body fat% and trunk fat%, respectively. In women, no significant between-ethnic difference is observed in total body fat%, trunk fat% and serum leptin. Thus, in young adult Mauritians, a population at high risk for later cardiometabolic diseases, the differences in body fat% entirely accounted for the observed gender and ethnic differences in serum leptin.

Attributive possession in 19th century Mauritian Creole

The paper examines the attributive possessive structures attested in 19th century Mauritian Creole. It is first shown that these include a construction with the preposition pou ‘for’, which has not been mentioned in the literature. The situation in Mauritian Creole is then compared to that in Seychelles Creole, a closely related variety. Also discussed are some of the more general implications of the findings.

Decolonizing Creole on the Mauritius islands: Creative practices in Mauritian Creole

Many Caribbean and Indian Ocean islands have a common history of French and British colonization, where a Creole language developed from the contact of different colonial and African/ Indian languages. In the process, African languages died, making place for a language which retained close lexical links to the colonizer’s tongue. This paper presents the case of Mauritian Creole, a language that emerged out of a colonial context and which is now the mother tongue of 70% of Mauritians, across different ethnic and linguistic backgrounds. It pinpoints the residual colonial ideologies in the language and looks at some creative practices, focusing on its oral and scribal aspects, to formulate a ‘decolonial aesthetics’ (Mignolo, 2009). In stressing the séga angazé (protest songs) and poetry in Mauritian Creole in the history of resistance to colonization, it argues that the language is, potentially, a carrier of decolonial knowledges.

Of nouns, and kinds, and properties, and why one D is null or not

AbstractThis paper assumes that the basic denotation of nouns can be that of kind or property and that the determiner system of a language is a direct consequence of this cross-linguistic variation. An analysis of how definiteness and specificity are marked across three languages with different determiner systems, namely, English, French and Mauritian Creole (MC), provides evidence of the co-relation between noun denotation and determiner system. Languages with kind denoting nouns (English and MC) admit bare nominal arguments, which are barred in French, whose nouns denote properties. However, English and MC differ in that English has an overt definite article, which is a lacking in MC. This null element requires licensing by an overt specificity marker in some syntactic environments. The English and MC definite articles are analyzed as operators that quantify over sets of kind denoting nouns, and they serve a different function from the French definite article, which is specified for number and selects properties.

Review of Guillemin (2011): The syntax and semantics of a determiner system: A case study of Mauritian Creole

Preview this article: The syntax and semantics of a determiner system: A case study of Mauritian Creole. By Diana Guillemin, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/jpcl.30.2.12all-1.gif

Of nouns, and kinds, and properties, and why one D is null or not

This paper assumes that the basic denotation of nouns can be that of kind or property and that the determiner system of a language is a direct consequence of this cross-linguistic variation. An analysis of how definiteness and specificity are marked across three languages with different determiner systems, namely, English, French and Mauritian Creole (MC), provides evidence of the co-relation between noun denotation and determiner system. Languages with kind denoting nouns (English and MC) admit bare nominal arguments, which are barred in French, whose nouns denote properties. However, English and MC differ in that English has an overt definite article, which is a lacking in MC. This null element requires licensing by an overt specificity marker in some syntactic environments. The English and MC definite articles are analyzed as operators that quantify over sets of kind denoting nouns, and they serve a different function from the French definite article, which is specified for number and selects properties.

The long and short of verb alternations in Mauritian Creole and Bantu languages

AbstractMauritian Creole displays an alternation between a short and a long form of the verb, which is reminiscent of the conjoint–disjoint alternation found in some eastern Bantu languages. Based on comparison with other French-based creoles and socio-historical evidence, we conclude that the Bantu substrate must have had an impact on the grammatical system of Mauritian Creole. We compare the synchronic properties of the alternations in Mauritian Creole and the most likely substrate Bantu languages of northern Mozambique and examine two possible scenarios for the influence of Bantu on the Mauritian verbal alternation, concluding that probably only the (syntactic) basics of the Bantu alternation motivated the persistence of the alternation in Mauritian Creole.

Modeling the Evolution of Creoles

Various theories have been proposed regarding the origin of creole languages. Describing a process where only the end result is documented involves several methodological difficulties. In this paper we try to address some of the issues by using a novel mathematical model together with detailed empirical data on the origin and structure of Mauritian Creole. Our main focus is on whether Mauritian Creole may have originated only from a mutual desire to communicate, without a target language or prestige bias. Our conclusions are affirmative. With a confirmation bias towards learning from successful communication, the model predicts Mauritian Creole better than any of the input languages, including the lexifier French, thus providing a compelling and specific hypothetical model of how creoles emerge. The results also show that it may be possible for a creole to develop quickly after first contact, and that it was created mostly from material found in the input languages, but without inheriting their morphology.

Introduction: The (not so) universal D

IntroductionThe (not so) universal D Solveiga Armoskaite and Carrie Gillon This volume grew out of our research agenda, seeking to understand the structure and interpretation of bare nouns in three typologically and genetically unrelated articleless languages: Lithuanian, Inuktitut, and Innu-aimun. None of these languages has articles, and yet they are very different from one another with respect to the syntactic and semantic behaviour of their bare nouns (for Lithuanian, see Gillon and Armoskaite 2013, 2015; for Lithuanian and Innu-aimun, Gillon and Armoskaite 2012; for Inuktitut, Lithuanian and Innu-aimun, Gillon 2013, 2015). This variation forced us to question the universality of D, as well as the universality of the semantics of D. Structurally, all nominals were originally conceived of as simply NPs. However, Abney (1987) argued that nominals are projections of D, rather than N. He based this on the parallelism between gerunds (derived from verbs) and nouns, as well as agreement patterns in languages such as Hungarian. Semantically, determiners have long been argued to create arguments out of predicates (Higginbotham 1985; Szabolsci 1987, 1994; Stowell 1989; Longobardi 1994, among others). Thus, there seemed to be a tight relationship between D and argumenthood. Further, determiners are often assumed to be definite (e.g., Lyons 1999; see Matthewson 1998 and Gillon 2013 for arguments against this). Both of these ideas are questioned by authors in this volume. Moreover, the nature of bare nouns is controversial: are they DPs (like other nominals), or are they different (in that they lack the DP layer)? There are three possible analyses: (i) bare nouns are DPs (just like all nominals) (Longobardi 1994), (ii) bare nouns are NPs (Chierchia 1998), or (iii) bare nouns can vacillate between NPs and DPs (Franks and Pereltsvaig 2004; Ajíbóyè 2006). It is also possible that bare nouns vary across languages: bare nouns in a language that has articles (like English) may still be DPs, whereas bare nouns in articleless languages may not be. The most prominent analysis of this last type comes from Bošković (2005, 2007, 2008a,b, 2009, 2012) who claims that there is a dichotomy between so-called NP languages (languages that lack articles) and so-called DP languages (languages with overt articles). Many of the papers in this volume specifically address his proposal, but only one assumes that his analysis is correct; many of the authors in [End Page 251] this volume found the DP/NP dichotomy proposed by Bošković (2008) to be untenable for at least some articleless languages. It is only natural to draw on Bošković’s work: the idea of a dichotomy is a plausible null hypothesis. Whether or not the proposed dichotomy holds—or if it does, to what extent—it still fuels linguistic inquiry. We hope the discussion in this volume will lead to a more clearly fleshed out and empirically motivated theory of nominal functional superstructure, as well as a theory about which languages and environments that superstructure will appear in. Beyond the putative NP/DP divide, there are a few other recurring themes that can be found in the studies included in this volume. Many of them are familiar problems: problems that have yet to be resolved in languages that are more commonly researched, such as Germanic or Slavic. The fact that we also find these recurring themes in the otherwise underrepresented languages of this volume, such as West Greenlandic, Mauritian Creole, Tagalog, Tatar, and Vietnamese, shows how important these questions are. We begin with the syntactic issues that arise. In languages without overt D, the relation of N to other functional heads must be sorted out, because other functional heads may behave like D (cf. the seminal article on the relation of classifiers to D by Cheng & Sybesma 1999, and Filip’s work on aspect 1995, 1999). Case is a plausible candidate for confusion. Does K (case) cross-linguistically flag the presence or absence of D? Or can a particular case be D (cf. Pesetsky 2013 on Nominative as D)? Or are these D and K heads completely independent of one another? Many languages lack any candidates for D, but in this volume, a few potential candidates were discussed. For example...

The perception of the French /s/-/ʃ/ contrast in early Creole-French bilinguals.

One particularity of the Mauritian Creole language is that there is no contrastive distinction between the consonants /s/ and /ʃ/, which are both pronounced /s/ in Creole. In this study, we examined the identification performance of the /s/-/ʃ/ contrast by Mauritian Creole-French bilinguals who have been exposed to French before 7 years of age, and who have been raised in a highly Creole-French bilingual society. The results showed that most of our bilingual participants identify the /s/ and /ʃ/ consonants like native French speakers. It also appeared that the way in which the two consonants are categorized can be manipulated by introducing subtle changes in the information these participants were given about the identity of the speaker that produced the stimuli. Our results are in accordance with recent studies showing native-like performance in bilinguals on a categorization task and, importantly, extend these findings to speakers of a Creole language. In addition, these results show that speech sound categorization can be influenced by information about the speaker's social identity and thus argue for models that postulate rich speech sound representations.

Simulating the genesis of Mauritian

This paper presents a computer simulation of the genesis of Mauritian Creole. The input consists of detailed demographic data and typological information on Mauritian as well as the languages which contributed to its birth. The simulation is deliberately a simplistic one – the idea is to have as few potentially controversial assumptions as possible built into the model, and add additional parameters only to the extent that its output differs from the real-world result. As it turns out, the model generates a language which is highly similar to Mauritian as it is spoken today, and thus, very little “tweaking” seems necessary. Most notably, the model produces the desired result without the postulation of targeted language acquisition, and while one cannot conclude that this was not a part of the creolisation process, our simulation suggests that it is not a necessary assumption.

Two Kinds of Definites Cross‐linguistically

AbstractDefinite descriptions constitute a core device for managing reference in natural language, and their semantics has been explored in great detail within formal approaches. There also is a rich descriptive literature on cross‐linguistic phenomena concerning definites, but the theoretical literature has only recently begun to incorporate a wider range of languages and phenomena in this realm. The present paper provides an illustrative overview of one class of recently discussed cross‐linguistic phenomena, focusing on languages that differentiate between different kinds of definites (namely German, Fering, Akan, Mauritian Creole, Lakhota, Hausa, and Haitian Creole) and the theoretical views that seem to capture the two types most straightforwardly: one type of definite, involving ‘weak articles’, is based on uniqueness, whereas ‘strong article’ definites crucially involve an anaphoric link. The contrast extends to so‐called bridging uses in interesting ways, and the fact that there is a striking resemblance in the contrast across typologically unrelated languages points to a fundamental distinction that natural languages can utilize in organizing their referential system. The paper closes with an outlook on directions for future research.

Literary translation as a tool for critical language planning

ABSTRACTThis paper argues that Dev Virahsawmy, an author who manipulates literary translation for the purposes of linguistic prestige formation and re‐negotiation, is a critical language‐policy practitioner, as his work fills an important gap in language planning scholarship. A micro‐analysis of the translation of a Shakespearean sonnet into Mauritian Creole is carried out with a view to exploring the dynamic interconnections between the macro‐(social) level of language prestige and that of the micro‐(text) level in relation to both the source and the target languages. This exploration proves to be not only valuable in its own right for postcolonial creolistics, but it also informs the debate on the ‘linguistic imperialism’ of English.

On the structure and development of Saxon-type genitives in Mauritian Creole and the processes of creole formation

This paper revisits the discussion of Saxon-type genitives in French-based Mauritian Creole. These genitives also occur in Seychelles Creole, Louisiana Creole, Karipuna Creole, and Guyanese Creole, but, interestingly, not in any of the other French creoles (e.g. Haitian Creole). How did they develop, and why do they only occur in a handful of these creoles? Several attempts have been made to explain their development and distribution. Focusing mainly on their occurrence in Mauritian Creole, Corne (1986) argues that they have their root in the Indo-Aryan languages spoken in Mauritius. Syea (1994, 1995) and Heine and Kuteva (2001), on the other hand, both reject this explanation and suggest, instead, that their presence is a consequence of internal developments. This paper offers a new solution which, while maintaining the internal development approach of Syea (1994, 1995), extends its empirical base with data from other French creoles and suggests that Saxon-type genitives in Mauritian Creole and the other French creoles originated in French doubling possessives such as sa maison à lui/Marie (lit. his/her house to him/Marie ‘his/Mary's house’). It argues that this development was made possible by a downgrading of the possessive pronoun from clitic in French to agreement marker in French creoles. The discussion is couched in the framework of Principles and Parameters (Chomsky 1981) and Minimalism (Chomsky 1995, 2000).

Creole exceptionalism in a historical perspective – from 19th century reflection to a self-conscious discipline

In order to re-evaluate the ongoing debate about so-called creole exceptionalism, parallels and continuities from historical texts are shown in a line of argumentation that can be found both in works from the 19th century and from today. Mainly, the influential study of Mauritian Creole by Charles Baissac (1880) exhibits considerable similarities with today’s exceptionalist positions. Persisting arguments such as the idea of creoles as “simple”, “young” and “natural” languages are (and were) to show the difference of creoles from other languages. Creolists argue that evidence of creoles as a distinct class provides support for the relevance and independence of creolistics as a discipline. Comparing contemporary and historical sources can shed new light on the epistemological heritage of the field.

The syntax and semantics of a determiner system: A case study of Mauritian Creole by Diana Guillemin (review)

Reviewed by: The syntax and semantics of a determiner system: A case study of Mauritian Creole by Diana Guillemin Anna Szabolcsi The syntax and semantics of a determiner system: A case study of Mauritian Creole. By Diana Guillemin. (Creole language library 38.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2011. Pp. xv, 310. ISBN 9789027252609. $158 (Hb). Mauritian Creole (MC) is a French lexifier creole with Kwa and Bantu substrate languages. In the early nineteenth century MC lost the French determiners le/la 'the' and du (partitive 'some'), often incorporating them into the noun stems, and became, in stark contrast to French, a language that allows bare count and mass nouns in argument positions. Diana Guillemin's book is dedicated to the documentation and theoretical analysis of that change, as well as the new system of determiners and quantifiers that subsequently emerged in MC. G is a native speaker of MC, but the study is primarily corpus-based, with over eighty text sources, ranging from eighteenth-century documents to Baissac's (1880, 1888) collections to recent internet posts. The analysis is carried out using current formal semantic and generative syntactic theories. [End Page 181] The interest of the work is manifold. One of the highlights is the study of specificity vs. definiteness in a language that lacks an overt definite article. MC diverges from its lexifier and resembles its substrate languages, which have been observed tomark specificity, rather than definiteness. To illustrate, consider the example in 1 (simplified from ex. 22 on p. 125): bare count nouns may be interpreted either as indefinite or as definite by virtue of uniqueness, but postnominal là serves to encode anaphoric definiteness, which G qualifies as [+definite, +specific].As G notes, 'The use of là serves to recall the topic, and once it is established that lacorde is the subject of the discourse, a bare noun can be used again' (125). 1. Alle çace to lacorde,... Baleine amarre lacorde dans ... so laquée... go fetch 2SG.POSS rope whale tie rope in 3SG.POSS tail Lacorde là vine raide... Lacorde péte éne coup! rope SP become stiff rope snap one time 'Go fetch your rope, ... Whale ties the rope to its tail ... The rope stiffens ... The rope suddenly snaps!' Ch. 1, 'Sources of Mauritian Creole', is a brief introduction to the origins of MC and an outline of the work. Ch. 2, 'Introduction', introduces the early changes from French to MC and the new determiner system. In addition to the above-mentioned loss or incorporation of the French determiners, MC lost the French copula and the case-assigning prepositions à 'to, for' and de 'of', giving rise to a massive [+/-definite] and [+/-plural] ambiguity in argumental bare nouns. The new determiner system includes the indefinite singular marker enn, the postnominal specificity marker là, the old demonstrative sa that is now in combination with là, the plural marker bann (from bande 'group') that is in complementary distribution with numerals, the phonetically null definite article notated as d, and so, a possessive pronoun reanalyzed as an emphatic determiner, equivalent to the English and French definite articles in associative anaphoric contexts in terms of Hawkins 1978. The chapter situates the study within the minimalist program and the hypothesis of universal grammar, and points to its specific syntactic and semantic backgrounds. Ch. 3, 'Syntactic framework', provides a general introduction to the assumptions broadly underlying minimalist syntax and lays out the architecture of the MC noun phrase. Following Chierchia's (1998) argumental vs. predicative parameter for initial noun denotations, the major change in MC that enabled the occurrence of bare nouns in argument positions is a parametric switch from predicative to kind-denoting, argumental nouns. The noun phrase is assigned the following multilayered structure, from the bottom up: NP, NumP (headed by [+count] and hosting enn, bann, or numerals in its specifier), DemP (headed by [+deictic] and hosting sa in its specifier), PossP, DefP (with the null head δ), and finally, SpP (headed by [+specific] Ø or là). Head movements (N-to-Num in count noun phrases, and N-to-Def in mass ones) will be followed by the phrasal movement of NumP or DefP to the specifier of SpP, giving rise to...

Serial Verb Constructions in Indian Ocean French Creoles (IOCs)

This paper revisits the debate between Bickerton on the one hand and Seuren, Corne, Coleman and Curnow on the other on the question of whether serial verb constructions exist in the French creoles of the Indian Ocean (namely Seychelles Creole and Mauritian Creole). It examines data particularly from Mauritian Creole (which was rather marginally represented in that discussion) and argues in agreement with Bickerton (1989, 1996) that serial verbs do indeed exist in this creole just as they do in Seychelles Creole. However, it also argues that their presence in these languages must be attributed not to an innate linguistic mechanism (as claimed in Bickerton 1989, 1996) nor to a substrate source (contra Corne et al. 1996, Corne 1999) but to an independent internal development in which consecutive imperatives were reanalyzed as serial verb constructions. It is assumed that, given the socio-historical nature of creole contact situations, consecutive imperatives would have been a prominent part of early input as interchanges between those who spoke French and those who did not would have mostly been in the form of directives (commands, instructions, etc.) which are more often than not expressed through the imperative . However, it is recognized that this development could have benefited from substrate (particularly Malagasy) influence but it remains in the main the result of an internal diachronic process. The proposal outlined has interesting implications for the role of input and the role that adults may have played in the development of creole languages in general and serial verb constructions in particular. Some aspects of creole languages, it is suggested, can be adequately accounted for without having to implicate either an innate linguistic mechanism or wholesale transfer from substrate sources.

English to Creole and Creole to English Rule Based Machine Translation System

Machine translation is the process of translating a text from one language to another, using computer software. A translation system is important to overcome language barriers, and help people communicate between different parts of the world. Most of popular online translation system caters only for the most commonly used languages but no research has been made so far concerning the translation of the Mauritian Creole language. In this paper, we present the first machine translation (MT) system that translates English sentences to Mauritian Creole language and vice-versa. The system uses the rule based machine translation approach to perform translation. It takes as input sentences in the source language either in English or Creole and outputs the translation of the sentences in the target language. The results show that the system can provide translation of acceptable quality. This system can potentially benefit many categories of people, since it allow them to perform their translation quickly and with ease.

A Semi-Automated Lyrics Generation Tool for Mauritian Sega

In this paper, we give an overview of how Sega lyrics, in Mauritian Creole language, are being written by Mauritian Lyricists and a tool which has been developed to automatically generate Sega lyrics. Research shows that song writing is not always an easy task. Someone cannot be told exactly how to write lyrics, but that does not mean there are not ways in which he/she can learn to do it better. In-depth analysis has been carried out on Natural Language Processing, Text Mining, Machine Learning and existing Sega lyrics to consolidate the foundation of the project. Interviews have been done with a domain expert to learn the process of conventional song writing. Thus a tool, Paroles Sega Morisien, was developed. Paroles Sega Morisien enables users to generate Sega lyrics from randomly selected Mauritian Creole keywords. It is the first time that such a tool has been developed. An evaluation, consisting of a comparability study, was carried out to compare existing lyrics against lyrics generated by the tool. The result obtained was favorable. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.11591/ij-ai.v1i4.801