Contact de langues au Suriname: un aperçu du projet 'traces of contact'

Abstract

'Traces of Contact” is a five year project at the Centre for Language Studies of Radboud University Nijmegen. The project aims at establishing criteria by which results from language contact studies can be used to strengthen the field of historical linguistics. The aim is to formulate criteria that can allow us to observe with greater accuracy whether a language undergoes changes due to outside influence or whether these changes result from the dynamics of the language itself. A number of multilingual contact situations with differring time depths and geographical extent are looked at in detail: the languages of the Amazonian fringe (thousands of years of contact), the multilingual society of Suriname (five hundred years of contact), the multilingual, post-migration society of The Netherlands (fifty years of contact) and specific groups of young bi-/multilinguals in an experimental setting (ten to twenty years of contact). The same two grammatical phenomena are being analysed with new techniques in these four contact settings: TMA and evidentiality marking and argument realisation.