Doctoral Dissertation Research: Exploring Sranan Syntax

Sranan Tongo是多民族、多语言的南美国家苏里南使用最广泛的通用语言，但作为克里奥尔人，它被污蔑为一种“婴儿谈话”。从历史上看，斯拉南人不仅是最古老的英语克里奥尔人之一，也是最具差异性的加勒比海英语克里奥尔人之一。这种演变是一段耐人寻味的殖民史的最终结果，其中包括英语和荷兰人之间的殖民地交换，这导致苏里南的英语在复杂的网络影响下演变，特别是来自荷兰语和几种非洲语言的影响。在国家科学基金会的支持下，Jacqueline Bunting女士将在苏里南首都帕拉马里博进行田野调查，观察其自然生态中的语言。为了考察斯拉纳语句法结构与英语句法结构的三个不同之处：格标、比较结构和连动结构，我们将从母语为斯拉纳语的人那里引出并记录叙事、一些特定的结构和翻译。这些材料将与英语、荷兰语、Ewe和Kikongo的相关结构进行比较分析--所有这些语言都与Sranan作为克里奥尔语的出现有很大关系--以便更清楚地了解Sranan的语法系统是如何演变或受到荷兰语、西非语言的GBE语系(特别是Ewe)或Kikongo的影响的。本论文的研究结果将与杂交语在语言进化中的假设有关。

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.