Doctoral Dissertation Research: Patterns of variable grammatical marking in Palenquero creole

Creole studies have advanced competing hypotheses about the structure and origins of creoles--languages based on two or more prior languages--most prominently contact with a colonial language, substrate influence, and universal linguistic processes. The Spanish-based creole Palenquero is spoken in the Afro-Hispanic community of San Basilio de Palenque, Colombia. This project examines variably occurring forms in Palenquero in order to test hypotheses about their functions and provenance. In the domain of the noun phrase, the focus of study is the demonstrative-article 'e' as the result of contact with Spanish, a reflex from the substrate Kikongo, or the product of language-internal demonstrative-to-article grammaticalization. In parallel, in the domain of verbal categories, this research investigates whether tense-aspect expressions function as grammatical markers and their possible sources. Since creole forms may share surface similarity to those of presumed donor languages, adjudicating between hypotheses about their functions and origins requires comparison of their distribution patterns. The Variationist Comparative Method will be employed. The data will be naturalistic speech gathered in sociolinguistic interviews with 50 Palenquero speakers, which will be recorded and transcribed. 1,500 tokens for each functional domain will be extracted, coded for factors operationalizing hypotheses, and submitted to multivariate analysis. The constraints on variant forms will be compared with constraints on apparently similar forms in Spanish and Kikongo and in light of predictions from grammaticalization theory. At the level of the community, this study will offer linguistic descriptions which can serve in the development of educational materials for the local schools. Moreover, innovative in this project is the training of community members to revise transcriptions, which provides an opportunity for involving community members in the scientific study of their language. More generally, this study contributes to the documentation of Afro-Hispanic language varieties, which have been socially stigmatized, and to demonstrating their systematicity in the structure of linguistic variation.