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Research & Grants
       
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I am involved in several research projects at the moment. One involves continuation of my NSF-funded research project with my co-PI, Bettina Migge. The latest paper we have published ("The origin and development of possibility in the creoles os Suriname") appeared in 2009. We are now planning a workshop on "The history, development and relationships of the creole languages of Suriname." This will cover a variety of topics, including comparison of various morphological, morphosyntactic and syntactic aspects of the creoles, the differing degrees of Gbe influence among them, and the differences that have developed due to internal causation. We plan to focus our attention on features such as lexical semantics, morphological processes such as reduplication, relativization, temporal clauses, predicate cleft, predicate nominalization, sentential coordination, etc., all of which have been hardly treated. The workhsop will involve key schola rsworking on the Surinamese creoles and the Gbe languages and will be funded by the College of Humanities as well as the department's Targeted Investment project to organize a workshop here at OSU in the near future.

I am continuing work on a research project titled "The sociocultural organization of language use in the African-American community of Columbus, Ohio," which I outlined in my last report. I had to place this on hold last summer for health reasons, but still plan to seek a Seed Grant to allow me to complete a pilot study before applying for NSF funding for a more detailed study.

I also continue my work on the integration of linguistic and psycholinguistic approaches to language contact phenomena. I have built my approach around Van Coetsem's model of language contact, but have added to his model to make it more widely applicable as a basic theoretical framework for Contact Linguistics. Several of my publications over the last two years have been devoted to this. I think this research continues to have a significant impact on the field, with more scholars adopting this framework, or at least making some use of it in their own research. Finally, the proceedings of the workshop on "Multidisciplinary approaches to code-switching", which Ludmila Isurin, Kees de Bot and I jointly organized, has now appeared as a book with that title, published by John Benjamins.

 
 
     
     
   
Copyright 2005, Donald Winford. All Rights Reserved.