Cognates of French articles in contemporary Reunion Creole

Abstract This chapter provides a description of cognates of French articles in Reunion Creole (or Réyoné) and certain prenominal forms which are not found in other Creoles of the area: la and lo as well as /le/ and /de/. It has been assumed that these forms display more or less the same functions as in French where they are articles encoding definiteness, number and gender. We will show that this is not the case. Our study investigates the morphosyntactic status and the semantic contributions of these expressions, in particular la , and offers some comparisons to French and Bantu languages, as well as insights on the grammaticalization process.