Description
In this talk we will present preliminary results from a pilot study of language use in the Surinamese Parliament “De Nationale Assemblée” (DNA). As Suriname's main legislative body, the DNA meets frequently (multiple times per week) to conduct its business in public meetings. Public DNA meetings are audio video recorded and published on the body's Youtube channel since 2011. To date, the DNA has published over one thousand recordings of their public meetings. Meetings follow a rather rigid set of rules for conduct (DNA 1990), and although there is no mention of language in the Reglement van Orde, Dutch is the default language of communication. The Dutch is of a regional character, and despite the formality of the meetings, members regularly switch to Sranan, the country's lingua franca, during these meetings. Occasionally other Surinamese languages, such as Ndyuka for example, are used. Parliamentary debates contain impactful information and special, formalized and often persuasive and emotional language. They are therefore considered an important resource for many disciplines in digital humanities and social sciences. Corpora have been constructed from parliamentary debates, for example, within the EU (Fiser and Lenardic 2018) and utilized in e.g. in discourse analysis and sociolinguistics (Hirst et al. 2014; Rheault et al. 2016; Bayley 2004). Our newly created corpus consists of approximately 7 hours of recorded DNA meetings. The uncorrected transcripts yeild ca 36000 words / 5700 utterances from 29 participants. Corpus construction has been automatized using an innovative combination of ELAN (Sloetjes & Wittenburg 2008) and its built in recognizers, elan2split (Cavar 2016), Python, and Google's speech recognition API. In this paper, we discuss preliminary results of an investigation into feature variation (‘er’, auxiliaries, verb-preposition combinations), pragmatic aspects of language use (persuasion, negotiation) and language choice among Surinamese parliamentarians in DNA meetings. Our findings show that (a) the influence of Sranan on the Dutch morphosyntactic and discourse structure is evident among Parliamentarians' speech, despite the formality of the setting, and that (b) language choice is agentive and the use of Sranan, as non-default language, carries added meaning when used in the DNA context. Thus, our findings contribute to a better understanding of the impact of language contact on Surinamese parliamentary language, an understudied language style. They further showcase the potential of parliamentary resources in linguistic research.| Period | 18 Jun 2019 |
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| Event title | Summer Conference of the Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Lissabon, PortugalShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |