SCrolL: the database of subordination in Creole languages

International audience This paper introduces SCrolL, a database tailored for the typological study of clausal subordination in Creole languages. SCrolL (Manfredi & Quint, forth.) offers researchers a comprehensive tool to investigate both formal and semantic aspects of the encoding of subordinate relations in ten Creole languages with distinct lexifiers (English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Arabic) and different substrate languages (Niger-Congo, Nilo-Saharan, Austronesian). SCrolL aims to contribute to renewing the semantic and morphosyntactic parameters for cross-linguistic comparison of subordinate clauses (Cristofaro 2003). The database stands out from other databases for typological comparison of Creole languages (Michaelis et al. 2013) in that it provides two integrated query interfaces, allowing users for fine-grained research on adverbial, complement, and relative subordinate clauses in Creole languages. The first interface enables a multilevel comparison of the formal encoding of these relations, offering empirical examples and qualitative insights into morphosyntactic variation. The second interface focuses on the semantic features of subordinating devices across the languages of the sample and it helps to trace back the etymological and functional origins of these devices, gaining insights into their historical development, semantic properties and domains of use. The paper outlines SCrolL's primary query functions, emphasizing their relevance in identifying formal parameters crucial for defining subordinate clauses. Examples of these parameters include the (non)sharing of one and the same subject between main and subordinate clauses, the presence/absence of subordinating devices, TAM marking, and the presence/absence of pronominal arguments. The paper also underscores SCrolL's significance regarding historical linguistics, particularly in examining the grammaticalization processes of adverbial, complement, and relative subordinating devices (see Kortmann 1996 for European languages). Positioned as an open-access resource for both creolists and typologists, SCrolL emerges therefore as an innovative tool meeting the general demand for crosslinguistic comparison databases while addressing the unique challenges posed by complex syntax in Creole languages (Veenstra 2015; Diessel 2004).