The use of gaan+infinitive in narratives of older bilingual children of Moroccan and Turkish descent

In this paper, I will focus on the use of the verbal cluster gaan+infinitive ‘go’ in Dutch jokes told by bilingual children aged between 6 and 13 years of Turkish and Moroccan descent. The children told these jokes at the so-called Salaam Lombok, a multicultural market which is held every year around September in the neighbourhood of Lombok/Transvaal in Utrecht. This neighbourhood is object of research within the TCULT-program (Cornips & Jongenburger 1999). The recordings took place in 1998 and the corpus is collected by all TCULTresearchers. The Moroccan and Turkish children have told their jokes in Dutch or in their native language Berber and Turkish, respectively. If we consider the Dutch jokes, it is striking that these bilingual children use the verbal cluster gaan+infinitive, as shown in (1), to a large extent (see Cornips t.a.):