32.1475, Review: Palenquero; Spanish; Psycholinguistics; Sociolinguistics: Lipski (2020)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-32-1475. Wed Apr 28 2021. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 32.1475, Review: Palenquero; Spanish; Psycholinguistics; Sociolinguistics: Lipski (2020)

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Date: Wed, 28 Apr 2021 16:10:01
From: Eliot Raynor [eliot.raynor at gmail.com]
Subject: Palenquero and Spanish in Contact

 
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36633537


Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/31/31-1470.html

AUTHOR: John M.  Lipski
TITLE: Palenquero and Spanish in Contact
SUBTITLE: Exploring the interface
SERIES TITLE: Contact Language Library 56
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2020

REVIEWER: Eliot Raynor, Princeton University

SUMMARY

The latest monograph by John M. Lipski represents another major contribution
to research on Ibero-Romance in the author’s ever-expanding body of work.
Palenquero and Spanish in Contact: Exploring the Interface (hereafter ‘PSC’)
stands on its own in the literature on Palenquero, departing from the standard
‘origin-story’ hypotheses (e.g., Parkvall & Jacobs, forthcoming); instead PSC
presents a range of original, empirical findings derived from fieldwork-based
– and yet controlled, laboratory-style – data collection. At the same time,
PSC fits within the general arc of author’s recent research, involving
experimental approaches to bilingual perception in Spanish-, Portuguese-, and
Creole-speaking contexts across Latin America, an ongoing project which has
revealed no small wealth of new insights on contemporary processes of language
contact (Lipski 2017, 2020).

>From the first pages of PSC, readers will appreciate the wide range of
sub-fields with which the book engages, including (among a number of others)
language contact, bilingualism, typology, psycholinguistics, and language
awareness. As the author points out, the sources of data that form the
foundation of PSC – collected on-site in San Basilio de Palenque, Colombia
over the course of several years – were ‘developed through considerable trial
and error’ and fostered through ‘a mutual learning process … as well as a
genuine spirit of collaboration’ (p. 6). True to this spirit, Lipski’s writing
foregrounds the voices of his Palenquero informants throughout, meanwhile also
revealing the process of evolution of his own thinking and providing concrete
justifications for each added element of the research design. 

Following the short introduction (pp. 1-9), the body of PSC is divided into
nine chapters, followed by a short conclusion (pp. 253-7). The first four
chapters set the stage for the crux of the book – that is, a series of
experimental studies with Palenquero speakers – through a detailed outline of
prior research (Chapter 1), a discussion of the (socio)linguistic ecology and
language policies in San Basilio de Palenque (Chapter 2), a grammar sketch
that handily compares Spanish and Palenquero – the latter referred to within
the community as Lengua ‘language’ or Lengua ri Palenge ‘Language of Palenque’
– with extensive examples drawn primarily from the author’s own naturalistic
field recordings (Chapter 3), and finally a review of previous analyses and
new data brought to bear on the question of Palenquero-Spanish code-switching
and code-mixing (Chapter 4). These four chapters make up roughly one-third
(pp. 9-94) of the entire work and are essential for readers who are not
already familiar with the structure of Palenquero or with the earlier
scholarship (primarily in Spanish) upon which PSC builds. Indeed, even for
those with more than a passing knowledge of Palenquero, this first third of
the text will be hugely beneficial in order to better interpret the findings
of the latter five chapters (pp. 95-252). 

In particular, readers will need to be familiar with the typological
(dis)similarities between the two languages under analysis. Furthermore, there
are a number of social and historical considerations which have had a clear,
unambiguous impact on the development of distinct levels of metalinguistic
awareness among different subgroups of Palenquero speakers within San Basilio
de Palenque, which currently numbers roughly just 4,000 residents, as well as
the wider community extending to coastal cities such as Barranquilla and
Cartagena. Delimited in this fashion, the main subgroups within the community
are the following: L2 Palenquero speakers, i.e. those who have been schooled
formally in the language since the mid-1990s after reforms to the Colombian
constitution promoted ‘ethno-education’ in public schools across the country;
Palenquero language teachers; ‘traditional’ Palenquero speakers, many of whom
received little formal schooling in any language and learned Spanish as an L2;
and heritage speakers, born into Palenquero-speaking families outside of San
Basilio de Palenque. 

The present review focuses more concertedly, however, on Chapters 5 through 9,
which, as stated above, comprise the heart of PSC’s inquiries and findings.
Chapter 5 (‘Palenqueros’ thoughts: Language identification tasks’) consists of
two perception experiments carried out with balanced groups of informants
(i.e. L2 speakers, language teachers, and traditional speakers of Palenquero),
which were designed to tease out linguistic and social factors affecting
Palenqueros’ judgments concerning the language(s) used in stimuli consisting
of Spanish-only, Palenquero-only, and mixed Palenquero-Spanish utterances
extracted from the Lipski’s corpora of naturalistic recordings from the
community. Among the major takeaways from these experiments is the the
author’s summarizing statement that ‘the mental boundaries that circumscribe
‘lengua ri Palenge’ include more Spanish(-like) elements than would have been
predicted from previous scholarship (p. 98). That said, the author highlights
that in the extensive body of recordings contained in his corpus, ‘nearly all
examples of complete intersentential language shifts are from Spanish to
Palenquero’, which indicates that ‘Palenquero is not the weaker language’ (pp.
122-123).

Chapter 6 (‘Palenqueros talk back: Interactive tasks’) outlines the results of
a series of tasks involving elicited repetitions, acceptability judgments, and
translations in which informants were presented with a subset of the
naturalistic stimuli used in the experiments already reported on in Chapter 5.
Results of the first, time-pressured task of ‘close-shadowing’ repetition, in
which participants were instructed to begin repeating stimuli even as these
were still playing in their headsets revealed a remarkable degree of what the
author refers to as ‘spontaneous self-correction in the direction of greater
intra-sentential cohesiveness’ (p. 145). The results of the utterance
acceptability task, eliciting metalinguistic judgments of what types of
utterances (i.e. mixed Palenquero-Spanish or unmixed Palenquero/Spanish) count
as ‘good Palenquero’, demonstrate that traditional speakers are the most open
to accepting ‘mixed’ Palenquero-Spanish utterances, followed by L2 speakers,
and least by Palenquero teachers. Among the results of the translation task,
all groups more readily translated mixed utterances into Spanish, with younger
(L2 or heritage) speakers doing so the most frequently and traditional
speakers the least.

A brief interlude from the empirical work that immediately precedes and
follows it, Chapter 7 (‘Palenquero-Spanish mixing and models of language
switching’) takes a decidedly more macroscopic, theoretical perspective,
delving into the nature of code-switching and code-mixing as observed in
Palenqueros’ perception data from Chapters 5-6 and the large body of
Palenquero-Spanish naturalistic discourse data from the author’s fieldwork.
Specifically, the big-picture question addressed in this chapter is whether
the data suggest something more like the ‘intentional’, systematic alternation
invoked in Myers-Scotton (1993), versus Muysken’s (2000) concept of congruent
lexicalization. In the author’s estimation, ‘Language mixing in San Basilio de
Palenque … is not characteristic of congruent lexicalization, but rather an
intermediate stage less constrained than the key requirements for
alternation’, explaining further ‘many of the smaller Spanish incursions in
Palenquero discourse respect constituency just like alternations but slip
freely in and out in the more tightly interwoven and less predictable fashion
of congruent lexicalization’ (pp. 169-70).

Chapter 8 (‘Palenquero as a second language: Data and analyses’) focuses on
data deriving from interviews and written assignments of L2 Palenquero
speakers, analyzing a series of specific linguistic features including the use
of pre-verbal TMA particles, null subjects, possessives, plural markers,
definite articles, verbal morphology, gender agreement, and negation
strategies. It lies beyond the scope of this review to discuss each of these,
but a significant (if broad) generalization is that the future of Palenquero
as it is passed on to younger generations via formal schooling in San Basilio
de Palenque is by no means certain; many features of the L2 grammars on
evidence in this chapter make it clear that some aspects of the pedagogical
methods used in schools are not particularly effective – i.e. ‘memorization of
emblematic phrases and story fragments’ (p. 224) – and that use in family
contexts and others outside of the classroom are increasingly limited.

Chapter 9 (‘A window into Palenquero-Spanish bilingualism: Grammatical
gender’) zooms back out to the larger Palenquero-Spanish bilingual community
of San Basilio de Palenque – including not only L2 Palenquero speakers, but
also Palenquero language teachers, traditional speakers, and adult heritage
Palenquero speakers. The specific linguistic locus for this analysis centers
on the phenomenon of grammatical gender, which, for many L2 Palenquero
speakers whose L1 is Spanish, presents a unique challenge that is distinct
from that which is typically analyzed in SLA research on gender agreement. As
the author describes it, ‘In order to speak Palenquero without interference
from Spanish, the bilingual speaker in effect has to reduce an already
acquired paradigm … and at the same time suspend an already acquired syntactic
mechanism’ (p. 235). Based on the results of six distinct experimental tasks,
this chapter is perhaps worthy of a review all to itself. In lieu of this, it
deserves highlighting that L2 and heritage speakers of Palenquero are very
much able to ‘turn off’ Spanish patterns of gender agreement in some types of
tasks; however, in many cases, this ability is overridden by a strong
entrenchment of agreement patterns attached to Spanish cognates for Palenquero
lexical items. These findings suggest a considerably larger conclusion about
gender agreement in general, which Lipski summarizes as such: ‘the
automatization of successfully acquired gender agreement prevails over any
cost associated with on-line creation of the syntactic dependencies that
instantiate agreement’ (p. 252).

EVALUATION 

Palenquero and Spanish in Contact is nothing if not a true testament to the
tireless dedication and exceptional insight of a scholar whose contributions
to linguistics cannot be understated. In his first book-length work in English
since 2008, Lipski has once again expanded the scope of Ibero-Romance and
contact linguistics, undoubtedly leading the way for his own students as well
as others to break into new realms of inquiry within the all-too-often
ill-defined field of ‘Hispanic linguistics’. As fellow language contact and
Colombian Spanish expert Angela Bartens put it in her review of Lipski’s
(2005) A History of Afro-Hispanic Language: Five Centuries, Five Continents,
‘Looking for shortcomings in this astounding book is like looking for
microscopic needles in a huge haystack’; from the perspective of this
reviewer, the same can be said of PSC. 

Some minor critiques must be made, however, although most of them are
editorial in nature. Indeed, it is surprising to see the number of easily
preventable mistakes in a book published by John Benjamins in the
long-standing Contact Language Library, which continues and supersedes the
prior Creole Language Library. These include numerous misspellings, including
frequent shifts back and forth between ‘Lengua ri Palenge’ and ‘Lengua ri
Palengue’, which is no small matter, since it is Palenqueros’ endonym for
their language. One particularly striking oversight is the inclusion of a
sentence fragment at the end of a methods section reading, verbatim, ‘Since
this was a first venture into the realm of interactive metalinguistic tasks’
(p. 96) followed by no punctuation. The reference list is also missing a
number of entries, including all citations of the Colombian linguist Carlos
Patiño Roselli; fortunately, at least, the foundational work on Palenquero
language and culture that Patiño Roselli wrote alongside Colombian
anthropologist Nina S. de Friedemann (1983) is listed. 

Beyond the above issues, which one would have expected the editors of the
series to have remedied before putting into press a work of such significance
as PSC, there is only one substantive, albeit again minor, critique to
mention, notable only insofar as it recurs in a few passages. In these limited
instances, Lipski appears to express frustration towards his
Palenquero-speaking informants, for instance, for not providing expected
responses in judgment tasks: ‘Although Palenqueros have welcomed scholars and
students from around the world and do not demand demonstrations of linguistic
loyalty, the polarizing effect of certain lexical and grammatical items can
interfere with interactive research paradigms, i.e. any form of data
collection that requires more than the production of Palenquero language
samples’ (p. 29). In other cases, however, these concerns are framed merely as
difficulties, which, for reasons outside of Lipski’s or his informants’
control, prevent the recreation of absolutely controlled, laboratory-like
settings within the community (e.g., pp. 31-32). 

To appreciate this work as a whole, and indeed Lipski’s larger body of work,
however, is to understand that the author has worked for decades to develop a
degree of trust, respect, and solidarity achieved by few others in San Basilio
de Palenque, not to mention the wide range of communities across the Spanish-,
Portuguese, and Creole-speaking world in which he has carried out a dizzying
array of research. Readers of PSC are thus fortunate to be provided both with
a window into Palenquero ways of thinking about their language as well as the
author’s own reflections on how to approach this innovative line of research
in a principled, empirical manner. 

REFERENCES

Bartens, Angela. 2005. Review of A History of Afro-Hispanic language: Five
centuries, five continents. LINGUIST List 16. 2312.
https://old.linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-2312.html 

de Friedemann, Nina S. & Carlos Patiño Roselli. 1983. Lengua y Sociedad en el
palenque de San Basilio. Bogotá: Instituto Caro y Cuervo.

Lipski, John M. 2005. A history of Afro-Hispanic language: Five centuries,
five continents. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lipski, John M. 2017. La evolución de la interfaz portugués-español en el
noreste argentino. In Dolores Corbella & Alejandro Fajardo (eds.), Español y
portugués en contacto: Préstamos léxicos e interferencias, 391-412. Berlin: De
Gruyter.

Lipski, John M. 2020. Portuguese and Spanish unchained: Border experiences and
experiments. (Plenary tat the 17th Annual Diálogos Graduate Student Conference
of the Indiana University Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Bloomington,
28-29 February 2020.)

Muysken, Pieter. 2000. Bilingual speech: A typology of code-mixing. Cambridge:
Cambridge Univesity Press.

Myers-Scotton, Carol. 1993. Dueling languages: Grammatical structure in
code-switching. Oxford: Clarendon.

Parkvall, Mikael & Bart Jacobs. Forthcoming. Palenquero origins: A tale of
more than two languages. Diachronica.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Eliot Raynor is a Ph.D. candidate in Hispanic Linguistics at Indiana
University and a lecturer in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at
Princeton University. His research concerns social and historical processes of
language contact and change with a specific focus on Amerindian and West
African influences in Colombian varieties of Spanish. He has carried and
original archival research and fieldwork in urban and rural contexts in
northwestern Colombia, including the departments of Antioquia, Córdoba, and
Chocó.





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