Article published in:
Romance Linguistics 2012: Selected papers from the 42nd Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), Cedar City, Utah, 20-22 April 2012
Edited by Jason Smith and Tabea Ihsane
[Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 7] 2015
► pp. 43–60

How many “grammars” per “language”?

Mapping the psycholinguistic boundaries between Spanish and Palenquero

The Palenquero creole language (spoken together with Spanish in San Basilio de Palenque, Colombia) exhibits a number of key grammatical features found in no variety of Spanish; mutual intelligibility between Spanish and Palenquero is quite low. It is not unreasonable to assume that Palenqueros psycholinguistically partition Spanish and Palenquero, that they are able to identify given configur-ations as belonging to either Spanish or Palenquero, and that utterances con-taining both quintessentially Palenquero and uniquely Spanish structures will be acknowledged as mixed. The present study is based on experiments conducted in San Basilio de Palenque, using stimuli extracted from natural speech samples, entirely in Spanish, entirely in Palenquero, and containing what might be con-sidered Spanish-LP morphosyntactic mixing. The overall results suggest that code-switching as commonly defined is not explicitly accepted by Palenqueros. They also demonstrate an asymmetry between perception and production: “grammars” and “languages” are not psycholinguistically coterminous for LP-Spanish bilinguals.
Published online: 28 August 2015
https://doi.org/10.1075/rllt.7.04lip
Cited by

Cited by other publications

No author info given
2020.  In Palenquero and Spanish in Contact [Contact Language Library, 56], Crossref logo
LIPSKI, JOHN M.
2018. Can NEG placement have negative consequences (for efficient processing)? A bilingual test case. Applied Psycholinguistics 39:6 ► pp. 1147 ff. Crossref logo
Lipski, John M.
2018. Graciela Maglia and Yves Moñino. “Kondalo pa bibí mejó” – Contarlo para vivir mejor. Oratura y oralitura de San Basilio de Palenque (Colombia) . Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 33:1 ► pp. 206 ff. Crossref logo
Lipski, John M.
2020. What you hear is (not always) what you get. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 10:3 ► pp. 315 ff. Crossref logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 27 december 2020. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

References
Antón-Méndez, Inés
2011 “Whose? L2-English speakers’ possessive pronoun gender errors”. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 14.318–331. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Azuma, Shoji & Richard Meier
1997 “Open class and closed class: sentence-imitation experiments on intrasential code-switching”. Applied Psycholinguistics 18.257–276. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Bickerton, Derek
1980 “Decreolisation and the creole continuum”. Theoretical orientations in creole studies ed. by Albert Valdman & Arnold Highfield, 109–127. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Bickerton, Derek & Aquiles Escalante
1970 “Palenquero: a Spanish ‑based creole of northern Colombia”. Lingua 32.254‑67. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Boersma, Paul & David Weenink
1999–2005 “PRAAT: Doing phonetics by computer.” http://​www​.fon​.hum​.uva​.nl​/praat/
Bresnan, Joan
2007 “Is syntactic knowledge probabilistic? Experiments with English dative alternation”. Roots: linguistics in search of its evidential base ed. by Sam Featherston & Wolfgang Sternefeld, 75–96. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Cásseres Estrada, Solmery
2005 Diccionario lengua afro palenquero-español. Cartagena de Indias: Ediciones Pluma de Mompox.Google Scholar
Clyne, Michael
1972 “Perception of code-switching by bilinguals: an experiment”. ITL: Review of Applied Linguistics 16.45–48.Google Scholar
De Camp, David
1971 “Towards a generative analysis of a post-creole continuum”. Pidginization and creolization of languages ed. by Dell Hymes, 349–370. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Ellis, Rod
1991 “Grammaticality judgments and second language acquisition”. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 13.161–186. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Friedemann, Nina S. de & Carlos Patiño Rosselli
1983 Lengua y sociedad en el Palenque de San Basilio. Bogotá: Instituto Caro y Cuervo.Google Scholar
Grosjean, François & James Paul Gee
1987 “Prosodic structure and spoken word recognition”. Cognition 25.135–155. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Gullberg, Marianne, Peter Indefrey & Pieter Muysken
2009 “Research techniques for the study of code-switching”. The Cambridge handbook of linguistic code-switching ed. by Barbara Bullock & Almeida Jacqueline Toribio, 21–39. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Hualde, José Ignacio & Armin Schwegler
2008 “Intonation in Palenquero”. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 23.1–31. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Kroll, Judith, Susan Bobb, Mayra Misra & Taomei Guo
2008 “Language selection in bilingual speech: evidence for inhibitory processes”. Acta Psychologica 128.416–430. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Kroll, Judith, Paola Dussias, Carrie Bogulski & Jorge Valdes Kroft
2011 “Juggling two languages in one mind: what bilinguals tell us about language processing and its consequences for cognition”. Psychology of Learning and Motivation 56.229–262. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Lewis, Anthony
1970 A descriptive analysis of the Palenquero dialect (a Spanish-based creole of northern Colombia, South America). M.A. thesis, University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica.Google Scholar
Lipski, John
2010 “Pitch polarity in Palenquero: a possible locus of H tone”. Linguistic studies in Romance languages ed. by Sonia Colina, 111–127. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2011 “Decreolization as emergent grammar(s): some Afro-Bolivian data”. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 26.276–340. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2012a “The ‘new’ Palenquero: revitalization and re-creolization”. Varieties of Colombian Spanish ed. by Richard File-Muriel & Rafael Orozco, 21–41. Frankfurt & Madrid: Vervuert.Google Scholar
2012b “Free at last: from bound morpheme to discourse marker in Lengua ri Palenge (Palenquero Creole Spanish)”. Anthropological Linguistics 54.101–132. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Marslen-Wilson, William
1985 “Speech shadowing and speech comprehension”. Speech Communication 4.55–73. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Megenney, William
1986 El palenquero: un lenguaje post-criollo colombiano. Bogotá: Instituto Caro y Cuervo.Google Scholar
Meijer, Paul & Jean Fox Tree
2003 “Building syntactic structures in speaking: a bilingual exploration”. Experimental Psychology 50:3.184–195. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Miller, George & Stephen Isard
1963 “Some perceptual consequences of linguistic rules”. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 2.217–228. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Morton, Thomas
2005 Sociolinguistic variation and language change: in El Palenque de San Basilio (Colombia). Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.Google Scholar
Myers-Scotton, Carol
1993 Dueling languages: grammatical structure in codeswitching. Oxford: Clarendon.Google Scholar
Orfitelli, Robyn & Maria Polinsky
Forthcoming. “When performance masquerades as comprehension: Assessing grammaticality in non-L1 populations”. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition.
Pérez Tejedor, Juana Pabla
2004 El criollo de Palenque de San Basilio: una visión estructural de su lengua. Bogotá: Universidad de los Andes, Centro Colombiano de Estudios de Lenguas Aborígenes.Google Scholar
Pienemann, Manfred, Bruno Di Biase, Salomi Kawaguchi & Gisela Håkansson
2005 “Processing constraints on L1 transfer”. Handbook of bilingualism: psycholinguistic approaches ed. by Judith Kroll & Annette M.B. de Groot, 128–153. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Rickford, John
1987 Dimensions of a creole continuum. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Schwegler, Armin
1996 “Chi ma nkongo”: lengua y rito ancestrales en El Palenque de San Basilio (Colombia). Frankfurt: Vervuert. 2 vols.Google Scholar
2002 “On the (African) origins of Palenquero subject pronouns”. Diachronica 19:2.273–332. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Schwegler, Armin & Thomas Morton
2003 “Vernacular Spanish in a microcosm: Kateyano in El Palenque de San Basilio (Colombia)”. Revista Internacional de Lingüística Iberoamericana 1.97–159.Google Scholar
Simarra Obeso, Rutsely, Regina Miranda Reyes & Juana Pabla Pérez Tejedor
2008 Lengua ri Palenge jende suto ta chitiá. Cartagena de Indias: Casa Editorial C. I. Organización Digital.Google Scholar
Simarra Reyes, Luís & Álvaro Enrique Triviño Doval
2008 Gramática de la lengua palenquera: introducción para principiantes. Cartagena de Indias: Grafipapel.Google Scholar
Spencer, N.J.
1973 “Differences between linguists and nonlinguists in intuitions of grammaticality-acceptability”. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 2.83–98. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Treisman, Anne
1965 “The effects of redundancy and familiarity on translating and repeating back a foreign and a native language”. British Journal of Psychology 56.369–379. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Urueta, José P.
1890 Documentos para la historia de Cartagena, v. 3. Cartagena: Tipografía de Aranjo.Google Scholar
van Heuven, Walter, Herbert Schriefers, Ton Dijkstra & Peter Hagoort
2008 “Language conflict in the bilingual brain”. Cerebral Cortex 18.2706–2716. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Vinther, Thora
2002 “Elicited imitation: a brief overview”. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 12.54–73. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Washabaugh, William
1977 “Constraining variation in decreolization”. Language 53.329–352. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Winford, Donald
1997 “Re-examining Caribbean English creole continua”. World Englishes 16.233–279. CrossrefGoogle Scholar