The Role of Language Contact in the Development of Three Mauritian Pragmatic Markers

Abstract Although the last few years have seen an increased interest in the communicative power of Creoles (cf. Migge, 2020; Rickford, 2019), thus starting to shift the focus away from the traditionally dominant structural and historical research perspectives, pragmatic markers ( PM s) in Creoles generally, and Mauritian Creole ( MC ) in particular, are yet to be studied in detail. A notable exception is Chady’s (2018) thesis, the first in-depth analysis of three types of Mauritian PM s. Starting with a fine-grained description of the functions and uses of the MC PM s dizon , koumadir and savedir in spoken discourse, in this paper we consider the role played by language contact in shaping their emergence and development. We focus in particular on factors such as typological differences between source and recipient languages, intensity of contact, degree of speaker bilingualism, psychological and social links, and time elapsed since initial borrowing.