No abstract

No abstract

In this article I show three methods to use the Negerhollands computer corpus for a better understanding of the eighteenth century variety of Negerhol lands. The first one is the study of metalinguistic comments which are taken up in several manuscripts. The second method is stemma/variety research between and within texts with the same content. The third method to study the do's and doubts of the first translators in order to present the right variety of the language is the analysis of annotations, changes and erasures of the writers. This philolog ical approach was common in Medieval studies, for instance, but is hardly used with respect to Creole languages.

No abstract

There is a growing consensus that the varieties of Virgin Islands Dutch Creole (VIDC) -o en referred to as Negerhollands -should not be viewed as a single language, but rather as a language cluster of related varieties. However, there has been only limited systematic comparison of the varieties in the cluster as to their structural characteristics. We will try to ll this gap in this chapter by charting a speci c construction: the supra-locative prepositional phrases in two varieties of VIDC: the 20th century data recorded by Josselin de Jong and the variety in the 18th century religious texts. A systematic search in the VIDC data is possible because of the data base constructed for this language with the support of Clarin-NL. We will try to contrast the feature studied with those found in 17th century Dutch informal writings and in two relevant West-African languages: Akan and Ewegbe. The theoretical model used here derives from the notion of feature pool.