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Two creole languages are compared in this paper with respect to the possible reference of fully bare nominals (FBNs) in them. One is a Portuguese-related Creole, Kriyol spoken in Guinea-Bissau and Casamance, the other is a French-related Creole, Haitian. Both languages are similar in allowing for FBNs, i.e. uninflected nouns not in the scope of a determiner or a quantifier, in all syntactic positions and grammatical functions. The main difference between them is that Haitian avails itself of a definite determiner in addition to a specific indefinite determiner, whereas Kriyol only has the latter. Given such empirical data, which are examined at length and in detail, the paper aims to show that the referential possibilities of FBNs in both languages can be analysed as emergent properties from the constructions the FBNs are inserted into, without recourse to functional categories.