Tense, mood, and aspect in Suriname

Abstract

Various proposals have been made with regards to stability, or conversely borrowability, of particular aspects of languages’ lexicons and structures. In this paper, we investigate the stability and borrowability of forms and patterns of tense, mood, and aspect systems of the Surinamese creoles, Surinamese Dutch, sarnami, and Surinamese Javanese. Our investigation reveals that Sranan and Dutch tend to be the source language in the cross-linguistic transfer of forms and patterns in the Surinamese context, and that typological distance and socio-cultural factors play a role in determining contact induce developments in the languages studied. This suggests that,although our results loosely match various stability scales, language system external considerations so far largely preclude the construction of universally applicable stability and borrowability scales.