The existential-presentational conundrum: new evidence from Kréol Rényoné

Sentences that describe existence and presence in a context and sentences that introduce a new event into discourse are known to share formal features in many languages and have been argued to be indistinguishable. Availing ourselves of authentic corpus evidence and of the findings of interviews with native speakers, in this article we analyse such constructions in Kréol Rényoné, a French-based creole spoken on Reunion Island. We find that despite the shared word order and the marking with a form of the verb ‘have’ (NANA), existentials, or descriptions of presence in a context, and cleft presentationals, which introduce new events, differ in syntactic and semantic terms. We disentangle and analyse their meaning and syntax and we capture their intersection. The shared marking follows, in our analysis, from the way the two constructions interface with discourse: the propositions that they express are interpreted and evaluated in terms of the deictic coordinates present in the common ground when the sentence is uttered.