Nonstandard Dominican Spanish: Evidence of partial restructuring.
Item
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Title
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Nonstandard Dominican Spanish: Evidence of partial restructuring.
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Identifier
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AAI9720094
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identifier
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9720094
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Creator
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Green, Katherine Reese.
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Contributor
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Adviser: John A. Holm
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Date
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1997
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Language, Linguistics
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Abstract
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The goal of this dissertation is to provide evidence suggesting that many of the distinctive features found in certain dialects of non-standard Dominican Spanish (henceforth NSDS) are remnants of an earlier possible semi-creole with an African substrate. It is suggested that these creole-like characteristics entered the language via a process of language contact and shift which triggered substratal transfer and universal adult second-language acquisition strategies.;The data used to support my argument are all taken from interviews I conducted while I was in the Dominican Republic. Both the morpho-syntactic and phonological features of NSDS will be examined and compared to those of Spanish-based creoles, Atlantic creoles and Caribbean varieties of Spanish.;One of the most intriguing features is a previously unrecorded creole-like past tense construction. Two brothers I interviewed used a as a past tense marker before a reduced infinitive (without-r), e.g. "Si a pende un foforo" 'Yes, I took a match.' While this is quite unlike the standard Spanish past ("Si, prendi un fosforo"), it is very similar to constructions in Palenquero Creole Spanish ("Yo a desi-le{dollar}\...{dollar} 'I told him{dollar}\...{dollar}') and Papiamentu Creole Spanish ("Mi a kumpra un kas" 'I bought a house').;To account for these constructions, I suggest that partial restructuring, or what Holm (1988) calls semi-creolization, is largely responsible. Under this model, the learners (Africans) had no one language in common except what they could learn of the superstrate language. In learning Spanish, they initiated a process of partial restructuring which resulted in a variety of Spanish that shows substantial simplification and clear substratal influence. The data are evaluated in light of what is known about the origins of Caribbean vernacular Spanish, with particular reference to the monogenesis theory.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
