Veronique’s paper compares the use of bare and determiner marked NPs in Indian Ocean Creoles (IOC) which consists of Seychelles, Mauritian and Reunion Creoles. These 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 three Creoles exhibit many similarities in the expression of nominal reference but they do not grant the same categorial status to markers -la and sa. As such 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.

This chapter gives an introductory overview of the patterns of reference and nominal syntax in the languages of mainland Southeast Asia. The chapter begins with the principles by which head nouns are modified, for example by adjectives or relative clauses, or in possessive constructions. Many languages of the area have systems of nominal classification, especially numeral classifiers and class terms. Personal pronoun systems range from extremely simple, such as in certain varieties of Chinese, to extremely complex, such as in the systems of Thai, Burmese, or Cambodian, whose systems of pronouns show elaborate distinctions in social-hierarchical structure and politeness. Demonstrative systems of the area span the range of complexity, ranging from two-term systems to systems with eight or more distinctions.