Recent Evolutions of say-complementizers in Creole languages Evolutions récentes des complémentiseurs en "dire" dans les langues créoles

International audience Based on the scroll resource (Manfredi & al. 2023) and the data in APiCS (Michaelis & al. 2013), this contribution will give an overview of say-complementizers (also see Parkvall 2000) in several creole languages with different lexifiers, like the English-based Nenge(e) and Naijá (scroll resource), the Arabic-lexifier Juba-Arabic (scroll-resource), the Portuguese-based Guinea-Bissau Kriyol (APiCS) and one French-lexified Creole, Seychelles Creole. I then will zoom in on Seychelles Creole, the only French-lexified Creole that uses a say-complementizer. Ø-complementation and the French-derived ki (< ‘que’) complementizer are also used. In Kriegel (2004), I stated that pourdir, a lexicalization of the preposition pour (< Fr. ‘pour’) followed by the verb dir (< Fr. ‘dire’) was almost exclusively used by elderly people and limited to contexts where the speaker does not assert the content of the complement-clause. Twenty years after this first study, the situation in present-day Seychelles Creole obviously has changed: we observe a much wider use of the pourdir-complementation in spoken and written media as well as in spontaneous spoken language. A new study based on a written corpus (Verbatim Reports of the National Assembly of Seychelles, data from 2024) and spoken data collected recently will analyze if there still exist any semantic restrictions on the use of pourdir. I claim that the increase in frequency of the pourdir-complementizer is linked to what I have called the Distinction-during-codification hypothesis in Kriegel (2021). Seychelles Creole is the first official language of the Seychelles since 1981 and its codification is very advanced. I claim that in this special sociolinguistic context, constructions not found in the lexifier have more chances to become stabilized than those that continue patterns of the lexifier.