1887
Volume 26, Issue 2
  • ISSN 0920-9034
  • E-ISSN: 1569-9870
USD
Buy:$35.00 + Taxes

Abstract

A restructured variety of Spanish spoken by small communities of Afro-descendents in Bolivia differs from modern Spanish in exhibiting no noun-adjective agreement for gender or number. Only a few individuals continue to speak this most basilectal variety; the majority of speakers exhibit at least some gender and number concord, in a fashion that proceeds generally rightward, from determiners and other prenominal modifiers to head nouns, postnominal modifiers, and predicate nominatives/adjectives. Number concord (plural marking) usually appears before gender concord in mesolectal varieties, and occurs at a higher rate than gender concord across the entire range of Afro-Bolivian speakers. A variationist analysis based on a corpus of recorded material suggests that this gradual emergence of (feminine) gender and plural marking represents a systematic form of decreolization governed largely by structural principles, namely the stepwise activation of agreement projections. Decreolization is represented as a series of nested intermediate grammars, each of which properly contains the preceding one(s).

Loading

Article metrics loading...

/content/journals/10.1075/jpcl.26.2.03lip
2011-01-01
2025-04-28
Loading full text...

Full text loading...

/content/journals/10.1075/jpcl.26.2.03lip
Loading
This is a required field
Please enter a valid email address
Approval was successful
Invalid data
An Error Occurred
Approval was partially successful, following selected items could not be processed due to error