Peter Bakker, born in Dordrecht, the Netherlands, in 1959. Ph.D. from the University of Amsterdam. KNAW Fellow (postdoctoral researcher) at the University of Amsterdam.
Fellow (1 September 1995 – 30 June 1996)
The topic of my research at NIAS was ‘language intertwining’, a process by which mixed languages come into existence. This happens mostly by the combination of the vocabulary of one language with the grammatical system of another. I had intended to spend all my time writing a monograph on the theme of mixed languages. I almost finished the book during the NIAS year, and I hope to finish it before the end of 1996. The other book I worked on was the published version of my dissertation on the Michif language, a mixture of Cree (Amerindian) and French, for which I had to make some revisions and to which I added an index. This took almost three months instead of the three weeks I had expected it would take. This book is now being copy-edited by the publisher. Apart from this, I worked on some smaller articles and reviews. This led to some delay in writing the mixed languages book.
It was very stimulating to be part of the theme group “Bilingualism”. Although this already seems like a very specific subject all seven members of the team worked on different aspects of this subject so that we learned a lot from one another. The presence of the theme group on “Human Syntactic Processing” in the same period also led to some stimulating cross fertilisation.