Doctoral Dissertation Research: Exploring Sranan Syntax

在多民族、多语言的南美国家马拉姆，斯拉南通戈语是使用最广泛的弗兰卡，但作为克里奥尔语，它一直被污名化为一种“婴儿语”。“从历史上看，斯拉南不仅是最古老的，也是最不同的加勒比英语克里奥尔语之一。这种演变是一段有趣的殖民历史的最终结果，涉及英国人和荷兰人之间的殖民地交换，这导致了阿姆斯特丹的英语在复杂的影响网络下演变，特别是来自荷兰语和几种非洲语言。 在国家科学基金会的支持下，杰奎琳·邦廷女士将在哥伦比亚首都帕拉马里博进行实地考察，观察自然生态中的语言。叙述，一些具体的结构，和翻译将引出和记录从本地Sranan扬声器，以检查三个领域，Sranan句法结构偏离他们的英语同行：情况下标记，比较结构，和连续动词结构。这些材料将与英语、荷兰语、埃维语和基孔戈语中的相关结构进行比较分析--所有这些语言都对斯拉南语作为克里奥尔语的出现产生了重大影响--以便更清楚地了解斯拉南语的语法系统是如何演变的，或者是如何受到荷兰语、西非语言的Gbe家族（特别是埃维语）或基孔戈语的影响。本论文的研究结果将对语言进化中的杂交假说产生影响。

Sranan Tongo is the most widely spoken lingua franca in the multi-ethnic and multi-lingual South American country of Surinam, but as a creole, it has been stigmatized as a kind of "baby talk." Historically, Sranan is not only one of the oldest but also one of the most divergent of the Caribbean English creoles. This evolution is the ultimate outcome of an intriguing colonial history, involving a swapping of colonies between the English and the Dutch, which led English in Surinam to evolve under a complex web of influences, especially from Dutch and several African languages. With support from the National Science Foundation, Ms. Jacqueline Bunting will conduct fieldwork in Paramaribo, Surinam's capital city, observing the language in its natural ecology. Narratives, some specific constructions, and translations will be elicited and recorded from native Sranan speakers in order to examine three areas where Sranan syntactic structures diverge from their English counterparts: case marking, comparative constructions, and serial verb constructions. These materials will be analyzed in comparison with the relevant structures in English, Dutch, Ewe, and Kikongo - all languages which bore heavily on the emergence of Sranan as a creole - in order to develop a clearer understanding of how the grammatical system of Sranan has evolved or been influenced by Dutch, the Gbe family of West African languages (notably Ewe), or Kikongo. The results of this dissertation research will bear on hypotheses about hybridization in language evolution.