Finding Syntactic Characteristics of Surinamese Dutch

Surinamese Dutch is a variant of Dutch spoken in Suriname, a former colony of The Netherlands in the north of South America. The lexical differences between Surinamese Dutch and standard Dutch have been studied, see for example [2], but we would like to know if there are striking syntactic differences between the two language variants. In this study we will use automatic methods to compare syntactic features of two texts, one written in Surinamese Dutch and one written in standard Dutch, and describe the differences.