Ryan Durgasingh
Dissertation project:
Factors Affecting Trinidadian English Morphosyntax
CV
Work Experience
seit 10/2016 Lehrkraft für besondere Aufgaben, University of Münster 2007 - 2016 Part-time tutor/lecturer in linguistics, The University of the West Indies Academic Background
10/2016 Admission to the Graduate School Empirical and Applied Linguistics, University of Münster 2007 - 2013 MPhil Literatures in English, University of the West Indies 2004 - 2007 BA English Language and Literature with Education, University of the West Indies
Dissertation project
Factors Affecting Trinidadian English Morphosyntax
This study aims to investigate various factors influencing the morphosyntax of Trinidadian English via the International Corpus of English: Trinidad and Tobago component. While it is an empirical study due to its corpus based methodology, its research focus places it within the study of New Englishes.
Alongside its lingua franca, Trinidad English Creole (TEC), Trinidad has a native variety of English (TE) which is often influenced by its varilingual (Youssef 1996) relationship with the other code. While some specific studies on TEC features have existed for several decades (cf. Solomon 1993, for instance), very little has been written on the grammatical structures, which differentiate TE as a distinct form of Internationally Accepted English. Studies which have been done on grammatical features of the island's English (notably, Deuber 2014 and Deuber 2010) are relatively recent, and tend to focus on sociolinguistic issues of style and variation - no lengthy work has provided a descriptive account of Trinidadian English grammar. The advent of the International Corpus of English: Trinidad and Tobago component (a corpus of 1 million words in a variety of texts - 300 spoken and 200 written), has made empirical study of this variety of English a very recent possibility.