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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

Crosslinguistic effects in adjectivization strategies in Suriname, Ghana and Togo

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.

Keywords: adjectivization, codeswitching, creole formation, Sranantongo, Gbe, Akan
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
Published online: 12 July 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/cll.53.15ber
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