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What's Past Is Past: Variation in the Expression of Past Time Reference in Negerhollands Narratives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 August 2014

Robbert van Sluijs
Robbert van Sluijs*
Affiliation:
Radboud University Nijmegen
*
Erasmusplein 1, Postbus 9103, 6500 HD Nijmegen, The Netherlands, [[email protected]]
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Abstract

Negerhollands (or Virgin Islands Dutch Creole) is the extinct Dutch-lexified creole of present-day US Virgin Islands. One of the typical features of Caribbean creoles is the occurrence of both, overtly marked and unmarked pasts. This has been attested in Negerhollands, where there is variation between preverbal (h)a and the bare verb. Studies in a number of creole languages have shown that such variation is not random. Following up on these results, I investigate the impact of factors such as narrative discourse function, aspect, and syntactic priming on the expression of past time reference in 20th-century Negerhollands through a quantitative variationist study. The results show that the factors conditioning past time reference marking in Negerhollands resemble those in other creole languages but with an entirely different outcome: Whereas other (English-lexified) creoles typically use unmarked pasts, Negerhollands typically uses overt pasts. This may reflect Akan substrate influence rather than being a sign of language death.*

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Germanic Linguistics , Volume 26 , Issue 3 , September 2014 , pp. 272 - 321
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Germanic Linguistics 2014 

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