The grammatical items bin, fɔ, and mɔs in Sierra Leone Krio

Dieser Beitrag ist mit Zustimmung des Rechteinhabers aufgrund einer (DFG geförderten) Allianz- bzw. Nationallizenz frei zugänglich. This publication is with permission of the rights owner freely accessible due to an Alliance licence and a national licence (funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation) respectively. These items, presumably derived from English 'been', 'for' and 'must', respectively, function differently in Krio from their etyma, while, in the case of fo and mos, sharing similar uses. This paper tries to appraise descriptions of the functions of bin, fo, and mos in the literature with regard to their applicability to Krio and discusses uses that do not seem to have hitherto appeared in accounts of Krio grammar. For example, fo shares many functions with the Caribbean English Creole (CEC) alternants fu/fi; however, it also has other functions not found in CEC but relatable to uses of English 'should' in the realis modality. With regard to mos, apart from its epistemic and deontic uses, which correspond, more or less, to similar use sof English 'must', Krio mos has at least two other auxiliary uses which are probably not shared by other Creoles. The description of bin as a [+anterior] tense marker is also considered misleading, at least for Krio.