Contrasting the NPs of Indian Ocean French Creoles

International audience The paper compares the use of bare and determiner marked NPs in Indian Ocean Creoles (IOC). The three main IO Creoles share closely related overt indefinite, definite, demonstrative and plural determiners and the use of bare NPs. Réunion Creole is the only IO Creole which has a specific use for prenominal markers: definite singular lo, definite plural lé and indefinite plural dé. The paper analyses the marking of semantic and pragmatic definiteness in IO Creoles and attempts to relate the semantic and pragmatic readings of NPs to their respective determiner system. The three Creoles exhibit many similarities in the expression of nominal reference but they do not grant the same categorial status to markers to -la and sa. The paper discusses the significance of this difference for nominal reference in the three languages involved. It concludes that grammatical affinities between IO Creoles do not exclude functional differences due inter alia to the grammaticalization of definite determiners. Seychelles Creole determiner system represents the first stage of the grammaticalization of determiners while Réunion Creole exhibits an intermediate stage on the path of grammaticalization where both definite pre-nominal lo-and post-nominal deictic -la are in use together with demonstrative sa…la. The MC determiner system represents a further stage in the grammaticalization of determiners with a strong post-nominal definite determiner la and a demonstrative determiner sa…la, similar in form to its RC counterpart.