16h30
Pouchet, 59 rue Pouchet, 75017 Paris, salle 124 (accès/ map) & zoom
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Nele Arnold1,2,3 & Tonjes Veenstra1,2 (1ZAS -- 2CRC 1412 -- 3Humboldt Universität Berlin)
KI in Mauritian Creole: Which factors (dis)favor omission/insertion?
Variable complementizer omission is one of the classic topics in variation and register studies since the seminal works of Sankoff and Cedergren (1972) and Biber (1999). While standard French does not allow complementizer omission, it is common in non-standard varieties and in French outside France (Liang et al., 2021). Alleesaib et al. (2024) find that omission of que in Mauritian French is even more frequent than in the Caribbean and Canadian contexts. Their study reveals that spoken data show a lot more omission, and that certain grammatical factors (negation on the embedding verb, subject of the embedded clause other than personal pronoun) disfavour omission. They briefly compare it to Mauritian Creole, where they find very high rates of omission (92% in a spoken corpus) and hypothesize an impact of negation.
The question, however, is whether in Mauritian Creole the complementizer ki is omitted or inserted in embedded contexts. Our study examines the use of ki in Mauritian Creole in more detail on the basis of a large spoken corpus (Veenstra, 2016) that has a special focus on register variation. This corpus contains recordings of speakers in different situations, which makes it suitable to study situation-specific variation. We compare our findings to the results of Alleesaib et al. (2024) on Mauritian French, taking different grammatical factors (embedding verb, verb class, negation, beginning and subject of the subordinate) and social factors into account.
We show that the insertion of ki takes place more often with specific verbs (realize, remarke, dekouver, montre) than with prototypical ones (dir, kone, krwar) and argue that this is related to register and possibly points towards influence from French. This implies that Mauritian Creole has basically the same subordination system with two complementizers (∅ vs pou) as we find in most of the French-related creoles in the Caribbean, as has been argued for Haitian Creole (Lefebvre, 1998) and Guadeloupean Creole (Kezerian et al., 2025).
References
Alleesaib, Muhsina, Shimeen Chady, Guilhem Florigny, Guillaume Fon Sing, Shrita Hassamal, and Anne Abeillé (2024). L’omission de que en français mauricien. Paper presented at Congrès Mondial de Linguistique Française (CMLF), 1–13.
Biber, Douglas (1999). A register perspective on grammar and discourse. Discourse Studies 1, 131–150.
Kezerian, William, Vasily Tselioudis, Béatrice Jeannot-Fourcaud, Isabelle Barrière, and Renauld Govain (2025). Testing clause boundaries: Focus and complementation in Guadeloupean Creole. Talk presented at Séminaire Grammaires créoles, 20 October 2025.
Lefebvre, Claire (1998). Creole genesis and the acquisition of grammar: the case of Haitian creole, Volume 88 of Cambridge studies in linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Liang, Yiming, Pascal Amsili, and Heather Burnett (2021). New ways of analyzing complementizer drop in Montréal French: Exploration of cognitive factors. Language Variation and Change 33(3), 359–385.
Sankoff, Gillian and Henrietta Cedergren (1972a). Sociolinguistic research on French in Montréal. Language in Society 1(1), 173–174.
Veenstra, Tonjes (2016). Spoken Morisien Corpus. Collection MFE01 at catalog.paradisec.org.au. URL https://dx.doi.org/10.26278/SZB3-WE75, Access: 30.10.2025.
