The morphology of TAM marking in creole languages: a comparative study

Creoles have been argued to be morphologically poor based on the fact that they almost always express morphosyntactic properties analytically as opposed to their lexifiers. In recent years, morphological theory has witnessed a shift in analyzing some periphrastic constructions as part of the inflectional paradigm. In this paper, we review the morphosyntactic status of TAM markers in two creoles: Kriyol, a Portuguese-based creole, and Mauritian, a French-based creole. Although the markers do not necessarily show adjacency to their hosts, they exhibit tightness with their host and never show total syntactic independence. This suggests they are in the process of grammaticalizing to suffixation, elevating creoles to be inflectionally rich languages contrary to previous assumptions.