Doctoral Dissertation Research: Exploring Sranan Syntax

东哥语是南美洲多民族、多语言的苏里南国家最广泛使用的通用语，但作为克里奥尔语，它被污名为一种“婴儿语”。从历史上看，Sranan不仅是最古老的一个，也是加勒比海英语克里奥尔语中最多样化的一个。这种演变是一段有趣的殖民历史的最终结果，包括英国和荷兰之间的殖民地交换，这导致苏里南的英语在复杂的影响网络下演变，特别是来自荷兰语和一些非洲语言。在国家科学基金会的支持下，杰奎琳·邦廷女士将在苏里南首都帕拉马里博进行实地考察，观察这种语言的自然生态。叙述，一些特定的结构和翻译将引出并记录来自母语Sranan的人，以检查Sranan句法结构与英语不同的三个领域：格标记，比较结构和连续动词结构。这些材料将与英语、荷兰语、Ewe语和Kikongo语的相关结构进行比较分析，以便更清楚地了解Sranan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族（尤其是Ewe语）或Kikongo语的影响的。这些语言都与Sranan语作为克里奥尔语的出现有很大关系。本论文的研究结果将对语言进化中的杂交假设产生影响。

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.