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Part of
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
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rllt.7.04lip
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Cited by (5)

Cited by five other publications

Lipski, John M
2018. Can agreement be suppressed in second-language acquisition? Data from the Palenquero–Spanish interface. Second Language Research 34:3 ► pp. 309 ff. DOI 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. DOI 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. DOI logo
Lipski, John M.
2020. What you hear is (not always) what you get. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 10:3 ► pp. 315 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2020. Palenquero and Spanish in Contact [Contact Language Library, 56], DOI logo

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