Preliminary Material

Abstract

Trinidad. It was a visceral feeling of connection to the diaspora that I have never forgotten, like a strange longing to speak with my cousins from the borderlands of the Caribbean Sea.Fast forward to 2016, I met Dr. Leticia Burbano de Lara, a scholar in applied linguistics and education, who at that time was at the Center for Intercultural and Multilingual Advocacy, Kansas State University. As our collegial relationship and friendship unfolded, I learned that Leticia was from Costa Rica. I had the wild and admittedly very ill-defined idea of collaborating on something that would somehow land us in Costa Rica. When I mentioned Limón in particular, I remembered how Leticia's pores raised as she spoke about the discrimination and injustice that had been meted out to Afro-Costa Ricans by the Costa Rican government during the early to mid 20th century.Though in the early inception, that interaction with Leticia was a defining moment. I knew then that When Creole and Spanish Collide needed to be polyphonic space. We brought our colleague and friend Dr. Miki Loschky into the fold, given her rich research experiences and grounded personality. Remarks from Miki.As a linguist, the intertwined nature of language and culture has always been fascinating to me. Although my doctoral dissertation at Kansas State University was based on experimental research on reading, my heart has always been with descriptive research on how language is actually used in a given society. For my Master thesis at the University of Hawaii, I collected and analysed data on code-switching (one of the distinctive bilingual phenomena) in Honolulu, Hawaii where multiple languages and cultures co-exist. The university was home to Dr. Derek Bickerton, who is well known xii Tables and Figures 6.3 Distribution of single non-Spanish items 136 6.4 English-origin nouns in Spanish discourse 137 6.5 Distribution of Spanish determiners and Spanish nouns 137 6.6 Distribution of masculine and feminine determiners assigned to English-origin nouns 138 6.7 Comparative distribution of clitic placement for finite verbs 142 6.8 Comparative distribution of clitics for non-finite verbs 142 6.9 Distribution of multiword fragments 144 6.10 Region, proficiency and codeswitching rate 146 6.11 Region, proficiency and normalized borrowing rate 147 8.1 The stratification of participants in the study according to years of residence in the L2 environment 188 8.2 The formation of generic nouns with 'dem ' 194 8.3 Frequency in use of generic nouns with 'dem ' 195 8.