1 - Questioning a Long-Lasting Assumption in the Field

Summary

The Afro-Hispanic languages of the Americas (AHLAs) are rich in structures and prosodic patterns that would be considered either ungrammatical or pragmatically infelicitous in standard Spanish. Some of these features have traditionally been classified as the traces of a once-existing creole language, which would have almost completely dissolved after a process of decreolization. The present book was written out of the conviction that the Decreolization Hypothesis is on the wrong track and that such “creole-like” features can actually be explained as the result of common contact-driven phenomena, which are related to processing constraints affecting the interfaces between different language modules; hence, they are universal and depend on the nature of the architecture of the language faculty.