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In:Language Contact in Africa and the African Diaspora in the Americas: In honor of John V. Singler
Edited by Cecelia Cutler, Zvjezdana Vrzić and Philipp Angermeyer
[Creole Language Library 53] 2017
► pp. 343–362

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Crosslinguistic effects in adjectivization strategies in Suriname, Ghana and Togo

Published online: 12 July 2017
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https://doi.org/10.1075/cll.53.15ber
Our paper seeks to honor John Singler’s longstanding contribution to the field of Pidgin and Creole studies by doing a comparison of outcomes of language contact under different social circumstances in the past and the present, in order to contribute to a better understanding of the interaction between sociohistorical and linguistic factors and language contact outcomes, a central topic in John Singler’s work. Our in-depth comparison of adjectivization strategies in the Surinamese Creoles and the Akan and Gbe languages of Ghana and Togo shows that adjectivization strategies in the Surinamese Creoles not only include traces of the European and African languages that contributed to their emergence via substratum influence, but also traces of innovative strategies that are typically found in contemporary multilingual discourse.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Methodology
  • 3.Property concepts in monolingual language use in the present and the past
  • 4.Property concepts in multilingual language use
  • 5.Comparing adjectivization strategies in Suriname, Ghana, Togo
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
References (44)
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Cited by one other publication

Bisilki, Abraham & Kofi Yakpo
2020. Adjectives in Likpakpaln (Konkomba): Structural and Areal-Typological Aspects. Language Matters 51:2 ► pp. 3 ff. DOI logo

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