Comparing Afrikaans Morpho-syntactic Variation in a South African Underdeveloped Context

摘要

cqvip:This paper is a qualitative and quantitative evaluation of a particular methodology for uncovering dialectal morpho-syntactic variation. It outlines the challenges facing linguists on a project to document morpho-syntactic variation in Afrikaans in the Cape Provinces of South Africa as well as some novel data on the typology of expletives in Afrikaans. South Africa’s linguistic situation is precarious, rapidly changing and driven by underdevelopment. This poses particular challenges to the organization of a comparative dialectological survey at practical and methodological levels that are perhaps slightly different to the issues faced in European contexts where the methodology was developed.The preliminary results have uncovered previously unknown variation with respect to expletives.