Moving into and out of Sranan

In Sranan, a creole language of Suriname, motion in and out of locations is expressed differently from English, its primary lexifier language. Talmy (2000), among others, has shown that the expression of motion in English involves a verb that indicates the Manner of movement, e.g., walk, and, where relevant, a satellite that expresses Path, e.g., into or out of. In Sranan, by contrast, both Manner and Path are expressed by the verb, which may be part of a serial verb construction, such as go and kmopo in (ia) and (ib), respectively. A locative complement after the Path verb usually contains a specifying locative item, such as ini:

We argue that influence from the West-African Gbe languages that were part of the substrate in the early history of Sranan may account for the typological make-up of Sranan regarding the expression of movement. Recently, speakers have begun to use the Dutch preposition uit ‘out’ in Sranan to express moving out. This is related to a more general trend whereby simple locative prepositions have become possible in Sranan, whereas from around 1700 to the mid-20th century, the only simple locative preposition was (n)a. The recent developments imply that in this respect Sranan is moving away from its original state in which it is typologically closer to the Gbe languages, to become more like Dutch and English.