Mauritian Creole Research Articles

Notes on the history and the syntax of Mauritian Creole

L'A. propose un historique et une description de quelques regles grammaticales typiques du creole mauricien. Les traits syntaxiques examines sont l'abscence de serialisation du verbe, l'abscence de predicats clives, la regle d'apocope verbale, la complementation du verbe et les marqueurs preverbaux du temps, de l'aspect et de la modalite. Le but central de l'article est en fait de determiner le statut linguistique des langues creoles

Microsatellite Polymorphisms at the Glucokinase Locus: a Population Association Study in Caucasian Type 2 Diabetic Subjects

Glucokinase has a central role in glucose metabolism in pancreatic beta cells and hepatocytes and is an important candidate gene for Type 2 diabetes. Mutations of the glucokinase gene have been reported in Caucasian pedigrees with maturity-onset diabetes of the young and late-onset Type 2 diabetes. In population studies of American Blacks and Mauritian Creoles an association between alleles of a glucokinase polymorphism and Type 2 diabetes has been described. Two microsatellite polymorphisms (GCK 1 and GCK 2) flanking the glucokinase gene were investigated in Caucasian subjects. There was no significant linkage disequilibrium between the alleles of the two polymorphisms. The overall allelic frequencies for GCK 1 and the combined haplotyes did not significantly differ between 95 Type 2 diabetic and 76 normoglycaemic subjects. In an expanded cohort of 151 diabetic subjects the allelic frequencies at GCK 2 were also similar to controls. These results suggest that a single mutation of the glucokinase gene is not a common cause of Type 2 diabetes in English Caucasians.

On the socio-historical context in the development of Louisiana and Saint-Domingue Creoles

ABSTRACTThis paper presents a hypothesis for the genesis of Creole French by drawing conclusions from an illustrative comparison of Louisiana Creole and Haitian Creole, and by presenting a depiction of the social-historical context in which Louisiana Creole developed.Bickerton's bioprogram and Baker and Corne's model comparing Mauritian Creole and its Reunionese congener are considered and found to be inadequate descriptions of the genesis of Creole French, since they assume that all parts of colonial Saint-Domingue, the île Bourbon (Reunion) and the île de France (Mauritius) had the same demographic mix and social structure. This paper offers and alternative model which suggests that French planation colonies did not constitute monolithic socio–politico–economic entities. On the contrary, differences in social setting were reflected by variartions in the local form of Creole French. Furthermore, certain structural features were diffused from one territory to another via the focal centres that also diffused the colonial model of social, political and economic organization. These are considered together to account for the range of variation found today in Louisiana Creole, and to explain the striking similarities between Louisiana Cre le and its geographically most proximate Creole French congener, Haitian Creole.

Verb syncopation and predicate raising in Mauritian Creole

Verb syncopation and predicate raising in Mauritian Creole

Mauritian Creole Reflexives

Present-day Mauritian Creole has a complex reflexive system with the typologically interesting property that plain pronouns are unmarked for reflexivity [uR]. Corne (1988) describes this system, and argues that the [uR] pronouns developed late, as a result of French influence after the creole had jelled. We propose instead that the [uR] use of the pronouns developed during pidginization to fill a functional gap when the French clitics were lost. Early attestations of [uR] pronouns in Mauritian and comparative evidence from Seychelles Creole converge to support an early development of [uR] pronouns. Our proposal that the early development took place during pidginization is indirectly supported by cross-linguistic evidence: [uR] pronouns appear to be common in pidgins and Creoles, but rare elsewhere, suggesting that [uR] pronouns are one characteristic result of the pidginization process.

Mauritian Creole Reflexives

In the process of pidginization and creolization that occurred in the 18th century, Mauritian Creole (Mau) did not retain the atonic clitics of French. In consequence, morphologically marked reflexives were lost, or paraphrased in various ways using especially the lexical item lekor 'body'. Where French uses a tonic pronoun (in the imperative), early Mau retained the structure. Continuing French semantactic influence reintroduced pronouns (derived from French tonic pronouns), at least in the usage of writers in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and in modern times, due to an evolving society, in the usual speech of increasing numbers of speakers. The result, i.e., the use of unmarked object pronouns to handle reflexivity, is typolog-ically a rather unusual pattern.