TY - JOUR
T1 - Variable plural marking in Palenquero Creole
AU - Obeso, Estilita María Cassiani
AU - Smith, Hiram L.
N1 - Funding Information:
1. Within parentheses following examples are the speaker’s sex and age, followed by the recording number and time stamp (minute:second) of the example. 2. The corpus was supported by NSF (National Science Foundation) grant BCS-1226655. 3. Lipski (2012:33) has noted, in particular, that the use of ma and e ma among some young speakers appears to behave like (or be moving in the direction of) the Spanish singular articles el and la (e.g., ma puetta ta celao ‘the door is closed’). 4. Each of us independently extracted the first 100 tokens from the same materials, with 75% agreement. We subsequently cross-checked samples of each other’s coding of the tokens for all factors. 5. The rates of the other prenominal elements are as follows: demonstratives ese/ete/eta (5%, n = 63), indefinite articles un/un ma (5%, n = 60), numerals and quantifiers (3%, n = 33), and definite articles (1%, n= 17). 6. Separate analysis of jende ‘people’ (n = 213) indicates the same tendencies as in the general dataset for the favoring of ma in subject role, for example, Ma jende a ta kumo, asina, un poko loko ‘People are like, a little crazy like that’, however, the factor group specificity was not pertinent. 7. Palenquero does not have gender agreement. 8. While the literature claims that Palenquero has no definite articles, it is clear that forms like e in example (5), here glossed as DET, and which possibly derives from Spanish el ‘the’ or through demonstrative grammaticalization, may function as such. 9. Spanish glosses are presented in brackets. 10. For example, Lyons’s(1999:2–12) view of definiteness correlates to familiarity, identifiability, and uniqueness. His concept of uniqueness, or the singularity of the noun phrase, that is, “that there is just one entity satisfying the description used” (Lyons, 1999:8), is interchangeable with the definition of specificity adopted here. Another information flow category for investigating definiteness may be identifiability (Thompson, 1997:66). 11. Ma mamá suto ‘our mothers’ is coded as plural because the speaker, when describing her relationship with her first cousin (who was also present during the interview), was pointing out that both of their mothers (who were sisters) are dead. 12. Mass nouns (n = 78) and ambiguous nouns (n = 27) are excluded (n = 105). There were too few inanimate generics for a reliable ma rate. 13. The difference with animate generics is not significant ( p = .2355).
Publisher Copyright:
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press.
PY - 2020/10
Y1 - 2020/10
N2 - One of the most salient putative African features of Palenquero, an Afro-Hispanic creole spoken in northern Colombia, is the prenominal plural marker ma. However, plural number is not categorically marked with ma, which alternates with bare forms in plural contexts and also occurs in singular contexts. In a principled sample of noun phrases (n = 1,186) from the spontaneous speech of twenty-seven Palenquero-Spanish bilinguals, the rate of ma (versus zero) is 51% in plural and 13% in singular contexts. Singular ma is favored with subjects and specific objects, consistent with an association with definiteness. In plural contexts, where it is robust, selection of ma is favored with specific and generic referents in subject role. This conditioning indicates that plural marking is favored for discourse referential nouns, in accordance with the cross-linguistic generalization that morphological marking tends to appear on instances that approach the prototypical function of a category (Hopper & Thompson, 1984).
AB - One of the most salient putative African features of Palenquero, an Afro-Hispanic creole spoken in northern Colombia, is the prenominal plural marker ma. However, plural number is not categorically marked with ma, which alternates with bare forms in plural contexts and also occurs in singular contexts. In a principled sample of noun phrases (n = 1,186) from the spontaneous speech of twenty-seven Palenquero-Spanish bilinguals, the rate of ma (versus zero) is 51% in plural and 13% in singular contexts. Singular ma is favored with subjects and specific objects, consistent with an association with definiteness. In plural contexts, where it is robust, selection of ma is favored with specific and generic referents in subject role. This conditioning indicates that plural marking is favored for discourse referential nouns, in accordance with the cross-linguistic generalization that morphological marking tends to appear on instances that approach the prototypical function of a category (Hopper & Thompson, 1984).
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U2 - 10.1017/S0954394520000204
DO - 10.1017/S0954394520000204
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85102370635
SN - 0954-3945
VL - 32
SP - 293
EP - 315
JO - Language Variation and Change
JF - Language Variation and Change
IS - 3
ER -