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Against Simplification: Measuring French Gender Input in Shaping Mauritian

Fabiola Henri

University at Buffalo

Dewey 1101 Auditorium

Creole languages are customarily described as lacking gender agreement because of an alleged simplification during their emergence. This study tests that claim quantitatively, comparing the distribution of gender agreement in colonial French letters, historical Mauritian Creole texts, contemporary written Mauritian. Counting all adjectives, the mutual information between adjective shape and controller gender is not as strong as one might I assumed and a learner cannot reliably recover the French system from it. Mauritian shows that Gender is not lost but restructured since lexically or constructionally entrenched feminine forms as well as productive agreement with human referents is kept.