Abstract
The earliest notations in French Creole are reported speech, brief narratives, extracts from court records, religious documents and so on. The predicates of these Creole statements, derived from French verbs, are not inflected. The temporal inscription of these events and states in a temporal interval prior to the moment of enunciation is to be deduced from the situation and discursive context. If we follow Benazzo's (2009) observations on the genesis of systems for the linguistic expression of temporality, the two primordial moments in the development of these systems are the temporal anchoring of the experiences evoked, followed by the establishment of an aspectual perspective on the relationships between the facts evoked. The development of TAM markers in Atlantic and Indian Oceanic French Creoles shows strong similarities, both in the morphosyntactic positioning of markers to the left of the predicative lexeme and in their semantics. The first traces of a grammaticalization of the expression of temporality in French Creole languages seem to be linked to the reanalysis of the marker été + Vé or est à + V. I propose to discuss the contribution of (é)té + Véto the establishment of an aspecto-temporal system in French Creoles. The emergence of this anteriority marker creates an initial aspecto-temporal opposition between Ø + Véand té + Vé. Following Librova (2019) inter alia, we could resort to notions of reanalysis and convergence between French and African languages spoken by slaves, to explain the beginnings of the grammaticalization of temporality in French creoles.
