Chapter 12 The tense-mood-aspect systems of the languages of Suriname

This chapter deals with tense, mood, and aspect (TMA) marking in the languages of Suriname, focusing on the stability of forms, meanings, and structural pat-terns. Despite its prominent position in the creolization debate and occasional mentions in the literature on linguistic areas, studies on TMA in (non creoliza-tion) contact settings in Suriname are relatively few. TMA has been studied in detail in the world’s languages, however, in terms of: - typology (Dahl 1985, 2000; Boland 2006; Dahl and Velupillai 2011a, 2011b, 2011c, 2011d; Dryer 2011; Velupillai 2012); - creolization (Singler 1990; Bakker et al. 1994; Winford 2001; Velupillai 2015: 391–403); and - historical development & grammaticalization (Bybee et al. 1994)