Research Interests 


Broad:		 
Creole Studies, Sociolinguistics, Syntax

Narrow:
Creole syntax, Language Evolution, Language Contact, Grammaticalization, Heritage Languages, Null Subject Phenomena, Case Systems, World Englishes 
 




Dissertation:
"From English to Sranan: An assessment of structural similarities and differences"
Sranan Creole English, spoken in Suriname, evolved from a setting that brought two West-Germanic superstrate languages (English and Dutch) into contact with multiple African substrate languages, of which the most influential are argued to be Kwa languages of the Gbe family and Kikongo, a Bantu language (Arends 1995, Migge 1998). The complex historical provenance of Sranan raises questions regarding the dominant structures in the language, and whether these structures are more typologically reminiscent of their Indo-European counterparts, their African counterparts, or neither.  This dissertation addresses such questions through a study of three related and interestingly controversial domains in Sranan: (i) serial verb constructions; (ii) case marking; and (iii) comparative constructions. These phenomena will be examined, constructing more detailed and rigorous comparisons than are currently available in the literature. I will consider the grammatical structure and morphosyntactic features of constructions in each of these domains; I will also discuss parallel constructions in the superstrate and substrate languages that likely served as inputs.  Through these studies it will be determined whether there is enough evidence to suggest that these Sranan syntactic structures behave more like a conglomerate of the dominant Kwa and/or Bantu substrate languages as would be suggested by traditional approaches, or if Sranan syntax as divergent from these substrate languages as it is from English.