DOCTORAL DISSERTATION RESEARCH: Constraints on Structural Borrowing in a Multilingual Contact Situation

University Of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PA

Investigators

Abstract

Under the direction of Dr. Gillian Sankoff, Ms. Tara Sanchez will conduct fieldwork for her doctoral dissertation. She will interview residents of the Caribbean islands of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curacao in the creole language Papiamentu. Most residents also speak Dutch, English, and Spanish. These interviews, along with written texts dating from 1776 to the present, will be used in research on "borrowing" from one language to another. The most familiar kind of borrowing is the borrowing of words. Another kind is the borrowing of linguistic structure, such as word order patterns or verb inflections. This project emphasizes the latter. Ms. Sanchez will use quantitative methods (e.g., multivariate analysis) to interpret influences on the usage patterns of borrowed inflections ("-ndo" from Spanish and influenced by English, "he-" from Dutch, passive verbs "ser," "wordu," and "keda" from Spanish and Dutch). She will also examine word order patterns used for various pragmatic effects, and how these may also reflect influences from the other languages spoken on the islands. This project will make two significant contributions. The first is theoretical: The research will clarify how language structure and social factors affect borrowing. The second is empirical: The research team will make databases of the written texts and oral interviews available to the public. These will be published through the Linguistic Data Consortium of the University of Pennsylvania. This publication will provide access to otherwise hard-to-come-by data, benefiting both islanders interested in language and various scholars. The research bears on Caribbean social science and history as well as theoretical and applied linguistics particularly in sociolinguistics and creole studies.