Concordant subject marking in Mauritian Creole serial verb constructions

Abstract

Syea (2013) and Muysken & Veenstra (2017) identify some parameters along which subject marking varies in Mauritian Creole’s Serial Verb Constructions (SVCs). Subject marking in SVCs are shown in these works to be either single (marked once for the whole construction), or concordant (marked once for each verb). They argue there is an interaction between subject marking, subject type (referential or pronominal), and negation marking (single or concordant). This work expands on these findings, through the exploration of the SVC Composition parameter (as identified in Aikhenvald 2006). The findings show concordant subject marking for all symmetric SVCs regardless of the other factors above, but not in asymmetric SVCs.