Indo-Aryan influence in Mauritian Creole

Abstract This paper looks at possible Indo-Aryan influence on the grammar of Mauritian Creole. Although several Indo-Aryan languages have been in close contact with Mauritian Creole for almost two hundred years, they appear to have had only minimal impact on its syntax. So far, the NP so NP genitives (Corne 1986) and the semantics of certain prepositions (Kriegel et al. 2008) have been identified as having been influenced by the Indo-Aryan languages. This paper revisits the NP so NP genitives and looks at three other aspects of Mauritian Creole syntax, viz., null subjects of finite transitive clauses, subject-less finite clauses with topic object, and the obligatory presence of a second subject pronoun in serial verb constructions and argues that these may have been modelled on, or reinforced by, parallel structures in Indo-Aryan languages. This paper then contributes to our understanding of the development of Mauritian Creole syntax as well as supports the thesis that in language contact situations syntax is also susceptible to external influence although not to the same extent as phonology and morphology (Thomason and Kaufman 1988; Heine and Kuteva 2005).