How are polar interrogatives in Mauritian Creole formed?

Abstract

Mauritian Creole is known to form polar questions in two ways: by using the utterance-initial particle eski, derived from French est-ce que 'is it the case that', or by applying a rising intonation to the declarative sentence. This paper asks the question whether both question forms are syntactically interrogative sentences or instead have different underlying structures. The question is relevant if we consider that a number of languages use declarative sentences to ask (biased) polar questions, a question type known as ''declarative questions'' in the literature (also: ''rising declaratives'' in English). We evaluate the possibility of intonation questions being the equivalents of declarative questions. Using a battery of tests originally designed for European French, we present native speaker judgments from the third author of the paper. While we found that not all our tests point to the conclusion that intonation questions are declarative sentences, the test results provide significantly more support to intonation questions being declarative questions rather than syntactic interrogatives.