Grammaticalization in Seychelles Creole: the coding of reciprocity by kanmarad

Seychelles Creole (SC) is one of the few creoles with a grammaticalized reciprocity marker. The use kanmarad (< Fr. camarade ‘comrade, companion’) mentioned in grammars SC (Bollée 1977; Corne Choppy 2009) but its evolution and distribution modern have never been analyzed. This contribution first presents present-day data from spoken written corpora compares them to published Atlas Pidgin Language Structures, APiCS (Michaelis & al. 2013). Appealing several grammaticalization mechanisms discussed literature, it then traces back process kanmarad, that not very advanced closely related Mauritian (MC). In accordance Michaelis Haspelmath (2020), can be considered an instance accelerated functionalization which authors consider typical creole languages. Ultimately, study’s findings are light two complementary hypotheses try explain acceleration functionalization: Extra-Transparency Hypothesis (Haspelmath 2017) Distinction during Codification I suggest for SC. Both possible factors favoring ordinary language-internal process.