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LANGUAGE REVITALIZATION AS L2 SHADOW BOXING

THE CASE OF PALENQUERO PLURAL-MARKING

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2020

John M. Lipski Open the ORCID record for John M. Lipski [Opens in a new window]
John M. Lipski*
Affiliation:
The Pennsylvania State University
*
*Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to John M. Lipski, Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, The Pennsylvania State University, 442 Burrowes Building, University Park, Pennsylvania 16802. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

In the Afro-Colombian community of San Basilio de Palenque, there are school-based efforts to revitalize the once-endangered creole language Palenquero. At present, most Palenquero language classes do not include grammatical instruction, active student production, or corrective feedback, and there is little or no communication in Palenquero between L2 learners and fluent adult speakers. One result is that L2 Palenquero speakers are overgeneralizing the Palenquero prenominal plural marker to singular contexts, in a fashion that partly suggests a Spanish-influenced misinterpretation as a definite article. The present study summarizes oral and written production, and then analyzes processing data from an eye-tracking experiment confirming L2 learners’ emergent restructuring of the Palenquero plural marker. L2 learners have regularized perceived variation similar to learners of artificial languages, and the morphological marking of plurality is seemingly being lost, possibly morphing into an emergent but still unstable definiteness marker effectively delinked from number.

Keywords

Palenquerocreole languageSpanishrevitalizationpluralization
Type
Research Report
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 43 , Issue 1 , March 2021 , pp. 220 - 235
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant BCS-1357155, and in its initial stages by a grant from the Africana Research Center at Penn State. The author gratefully acknowledges the support and friendship of the following Palenqueros, all of whom have contributed significantly to all phases of this research: Ana Joaquina Cásseres, Magdalena Navarro, Basilia Pérez, Bernardino Pérez Miranda, Manuel Pérez, Neis Pérez, Venancia Pérez, José de los Santos Reyes, Raúl Salas, Florentina “Yayita” Salas, Sebastián Salgado, Víctor Simarra Reyes, and Juana Torres. And of course my greatest debt is to the more than 200 other Palenqueros who have shared their lives and their languages with me. Thanks to Laura Rodrigo Cristóbal for getting me started with relevant R scripts, and to Jessica Vélez-Avilés for verifying the accuracy of the responses.

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