Negation in Palenquero

Abstract

A conspicuous feature of Palenquero (P) morphosyntax is the unusual, though by no means unique, often clause-final or sentence-final placement of the predicate negator nu 'not ', e.g., i [NU] kelé bae aya NU 'I don't want to go there'. Previous descriptions, often cited in the literature, present oversimplified (and, therefore, misleading) accounts of the data. This paper attempts to rectify the descriptions found in Bickerton & Escalante [B&E] (1970), Lewis (1970), Friedemann & Patino Rosselli [F&P] (1983), andMegenney (1986).Based on an extensive corpus of informal spoken data, it is demonstrated that Palenqueros (Ps) systematically use not one but two basic creole negation patterns -preverbal and postverbal nu -and that the selection of construction signals important discourse pragmatic information. The study goes beyond earlier accounts by providing evidence that the syntax of postverbal nu is not, as generally claimed, utterance-final. The frequent placement of this negator at the end of a clause or sentence depends rather on the absence of constructions which occur infrequently. Such facts, together with the argument that a preverbal negation strategy cannot be viewed as a simple case of interference from Spanish (S), show that, contrary to the opinion of previous investigators, P negation exhibits virtually no signs of decreolization. 1.168 ARMIN SCHWEGLER Granda (1978:414-5), and seemingly also Byrne (1987:2) consider that, prior to the recent intensive contact with the outside world, slow convergence with S over the past three centuries has led to a post-creole continuum. Del Castillo (1984:88) and F&P (1983:185) reject this analysis, arguing (justifiably) that the current situation in San Basilio is still one of diglossia. 3 Lipski & Schwegler (forthcoming) suggest that three factors in particular have distorted research findings: (1) insufficient fluency in P on the part of the investigators, (2) excessive reliance on information obtained from P informants now residing in the (more hospitable) neighboring urban centers of Cartagena or Barranquilla, and (3) the accepted but erroneous belief that the speech modality found in the lumbalú -the ancestral funeral song still practiced today (Schwegler forthcoming b and e) -preserves an unusually heavy dose of unanalyzable African elements that must have characterized the early colonial speech of Ps. What is even more damaging to any study of this creole is the failure by researchers to draw attention to the frequent, often extremely rapid, and, therefore, admittedly not always easy to detect code-switching that takes place in free, uninterrupted conversations among fully bilingual Ps. 4 Lack of attention to such switching operations, as well as insufficient knowledge of either speech variety found in Palenque, has often led to false analyses of certain features (e.g., negation, as argued below), and brought about the hypervaluation of supposed interferences between S and P. 5 These points suggest the fundamental insufficiency of P studies when dealing ...

Aspects of discontinuous negation in Santome

“…I do not adopt this type of analyses because Palenquero appears to be different from Afrikaans and Santome in the sense that Neg2 is not obligatory, although the status of Neg1…Neg2 and exclusive Neg2 structures in Palenquero is still somewhat controversial (cf. also Schwegler 1991).…”

“…Despite the absence of the preverbal marker in LU's unmarked negation patterns, it occurs exceptionally in at least one very specific environment where the other 3 To the best of my knowledge, the exceptions are Afrikaans (Den Besten 1986, a.o. ), Berbice Dutch (Kouwenberg 1994) and Palenquero (Schwegler 1991, Dieck 2000, which exhibit either basic final or discontinuous negation. 4 Since none of these Creoles has an official orthography, I have adapted the orthographies to the one I have been using for ST (cf.…”

“…In examples like (13)(14), Neg2 can only occupy the final position with respect to other constituents. In other creolized languages that exhibit discontinuous negation, Afrikaans (Bell 2004, Robbers 1997 and Palenquero (Dieck 2000, Schwegler 1991 It can be shown that contrastive focus can only operate on those elements that are within the scope of negation. For that reason, the adjunct antê taji in (18a) can indeed be contrastively focused, whereas the b. example cannot (it is therefore ungrammatical).…”

Review of Singler (1990): Pidgin and creole tense-mood-aspect systems

“…Although not directly concerned with -ba, Schwegler (1991), especially section 4.1.3.2.1, and Schwegler (1992) offer several examples in which the anterior marker is suffixed to nonverbal elements. For a recent discussion of the seemingly identical use of Crioulo (Guinea Bissau) -ba, see Kihm (1989:366).…”

“…By the same token, the way in which individual pidgins and creoles (including those which have been studied fairly extensively) conform to, or depart from, the prototypical TMA system cannot be argued with certainty because of errors in transcription and/ or morpheme analysis in currently available data or descriptive grammars (Schwegler 1992). (4) Implicit in B's claims is the assumption that the so-called basilectal plantation creoles (i.e., those considered to be closest to the ideal "genetic" mapping of language) have not changed significantly since their genesis.…”