Development of Tense, Mood and Aspect in Mauritian Creole

I studied the development of Mauritian Creole’s tense, mood and aspect (TMA) markers from their first appearance in texts from the 1700s until the present day. On a descriptive level, I tracked their diachronic evolution and provided a detailed historical account, since an in-depth study of the development of Mauritian’s TMA markers is missing. As well as analysing historical texts, which incorporated a canonical typology approach (Corbett, 2007) and interpreted the findings according to Bybee et al.’s (1994) grammaticalisation framework, a number of elicitation techniques (including acceptability judgements, translation and semi-structured interviews) were used to examine the TMA markers in modern Mauritian Creole.