Sandro Sessarego

University of Texas at Austin | UT · Department of Linguistics

El español chocoano (EC) es un vernáculo afrohispánico hablado en las tierras bajas del Pacífico colombiano (Departamento del Chocó). Aunque lingüísticamente similar al español colombiano estándar, las condiciones históricas del Departamento del Chocó parecen haber sido ideales para el desarrollo de una lengua criolla: población blanca reducida, in...

The Afro-Hispanic Languages of the Americas (AHLAs) present a number of grammatical similarities that have traditionally been ascribed to a previous creole stage. Approaching creole studies from contrasting standpoints, this groundbreaking book provides a new account of these phenomena. How did these features come about? What linguistic mechanisms...

This paper addresses the long-standing debate on the nature and complexity of creole languages. Contrary to what has been claimed in the literature, it is argued that grammars are neither robustly transmitted during the emergence of creoles nor that creole languages represent the simplest grammars in the world. On the contrary, after laying down a...

Exploring creole studies from a linguistic, historical, and socio-cultural perspective, this study advances our knowledge of the subject by using a cohesive approach to provide new theoretical insights into language shift, language acquisition and language change. It compares the legal system regulating black slavery in Chocó, Colombia with the sys...

Language Contact and the Making of an Afro-Hispanic Vernacular - by Sandro Sessarego September 2019

Language Contact and the Making of an Afro-Hispanic Vernacular - by Sandro Sessarego September 2019

Language Contact and the Making of an Afro-Hispanic Vernacular - by Sandro Sessarego September 2019

Language Contact and the Making of an Afro-Hispanic Vernacular - by Sandro Sessarego September 2019

Language Contact and the Making of an Afro-Hispanic Vernacular - by Sandro Sessarego September 2019

Language Contact and the Making of an Afro-Hispanic Vernacular - by Sandro Sessarego September 2019

Language Contact and the Making of an Afro-Hispanic Vernacular - by Sandro Sessarego September 2019

Language Contact and the Making of an Afro-Hispanic Vernacular - by Sandro Sessarego September 2019

This study offers a prosodic analysis of broad focus declarative sentences in Chota Valley Spanish (CVS), an Afro-Hispanic dialect of Ecuador. Findings indicate that its phonological inventory of pitch accents and phrase boundary tones appears to be significantly simplified in comparison to what has been reported for other native, non-contact varie...

This study provides a formal analysis of certain aspects of Afro-Bolivian Spanish (ABS) morphosyntax that are relevant to both hypotheses on the origins of the Afro-Hispanic languages of the Americas (i.e., the Decreolization Hypothesis, et seq) and theoretical proposals on the nature of cross-linguistic variation (i.e., Null Subject Parameter, NSP...

This paper claims that legal history has much to offer to the study of the Afro-European languages that developed in the Americas. In particular, it is suggested that a comparative analysis of colonial slave laws may help us better understand why certain colonies were more conducive to the formation/preservation of creole languages than others. Thi...

This paper provides an analysis of Chocó Spanish (CS) neutral declarative intonation. Results show that this Afro-Colombian dialect, in line with other black vernaculars spoken in Latin America and other cases of Spanish in contact, presents a reduced inventory of pitch accents when compared to other varieties of Spanish. Specifically, L+H* (i.e.,...

Lingua Special Issue Vol. 202

This study offers a linguistic and sociohistorical analysis of Chocó Spanish (CS), an Afro-Hispanic variety spoken in the Pacific lowlands of Colombia by the descendants of the slaves taken to this region to work in gold mines during the colonial era. This research also tackles the many questions arising from the much-debated origins of the Afro-Hi...

With the advent of the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995), the prevailing view of linguistic variation and contrast within universal Grammar has undergone a shift from rigidly defined parameters ˗associated with clusters of properties (Chomsky 1981; Chomsky & Lasnik 1993)˗ to an approach in which features play a central role, are flexibly distribute...

Chocó Spanish is an Afro-Hispanic dialect spoken in the Pacific lowlands of Colombia. This variety is characterized by the presence of double-negative constructions ( neg 2) (i.e., yo no como no “I do not eat”), which have repeatedly been classified in the literature as the contemporary traces of a previous Afro-Portuguese creole stage for this ver...

The origins of the Afro-Hispanic Languages of the Americas (AHLAs), the languages that developed in Latin America from the contact of African languages and Spanish in colonial times, are extremely intriguing, since it still has to be explained why we do not find creole languages in certain regions of Spanish America, where the socio-demographic con...

This paper provides a phonetic analysis of intervocalic /r/ in lower-class Highland Bolivian Spanish. Results show that in this dialect rhotic assibilation has progressed beyond the fricative [ř] already reported by several scholars (cf. Navarro Tomás 1980; Canfield 1981; Lipski 1994; Sessarego 2011), to a voiced apical sibilant [z̺]. This article,...

Chocó Spanish (CS) is an Afro-Hispanic vernacular spoken in the Department of Chocó , located in the Pacific lowlands of Colombia. This dialect has long been at the center of linguistic disputes concerning the genesis and evolution of the Afro-Hispanic Languages of the Americas (AHLAs). A widespread view in creole literature suggests that CS may be...

This paper analyzes the spontaneously produced intonation of Afro-Bolivian Spanish (ABS) declaratives. ABS is an Afro-Hispanic language of the Americas (AHLAs) spoken in the region of Los Yungas, Department of La Paz, Bolivia. The main findings indicate the presence in ABS of certain intonational features that diverge from those of other native var...

This book explores the current state of Spanish sociolinguistics and its contribution to theories of language variation and change, from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives. It offers original analyses on a variety of topics across a wide spectrum of linguistic subfields from different formal, experimental, and corpus-based standpoints. The...

The present work not only contributes to shedding light on the linguistic and socio-historical origins of Afro-Peruvian Spanish, it also helps clarify the controversial puzzle concerning the genesis of Spanish creoles in the Americas in a broader sense. In order to provide a more concrete answer to the questions raised by McWhorter’s book on The Mi...

This volume is an edited collection of articles dealing with Hispanic contact linguistics in the Americas. The project is composed of four main sections, organized according to the type of socio-historical scenario that characterizes the nature of the contact situation: Spanish in contact with indigenous languages; Spanish in contact with coerced-m...

This study presents linguistic and sociohistorical data on Afro-Peruvian Spanish (APS), an Afro-Hispanic dialect spoken in the province of Chincha (coastal Peru) by the descendants of the slaves taken to this region to work on sugarcane plantations in the seventeenth century. The present work provides new information on the origin of APS. In so doi...

Chota Valley Spanish (CVS) is an Afro-Hispanic dialect spoken in the provinces of Imbabura and Carchi, Ecuador. The structure of CVS is relatively similar to Spanish, even though the conditions that characterized colonial Chota Valley seem — at a first glance — to have been ideal for a creole language to develop: a low white/black ratio, harsh work...

This study provides a syntactic description of the Afro-Bolivian Spanish determiner phrase. Afro-Bolivian Spanish is one of the many Afro-Hispanic dialects spoken across Latin America and, from a theoretical point of view, is rich in constructions that would be considered ungrammatical in standard Spanish. Yet these constructions form the core gram...

Chota Valley Spanish is an Afro-Hispanic language of Northern Ecuador spoken by the descendants of the slaves taken to this region to work on Jesuit sugarcane plantations during colonial time. Based on fieldwork research carried out in Choteño communities, the current book provides a linguistic description of this language by exploring several aspe...

This article offers an analysis of the social and linguistic factors affecting unstressed vowel weakening (UVW) phenomena in a little studied Andean dialect, Cochabambino Spanish. This work is also the first analysis of Spanish UVW that relies on data collected through a read-aloud task.

This article provides a sociohistorical and linguistic account for the development of Afro-Bolivian Spanish (ABS), an Afro-Hispanic vernacular spoken in Los Yungas, Department of La Paz, Bolivia. Previous research has indicated that ABS might be the descendent of an Afro-Hispanic pidgin (Lipski 2008), which first creolized in colonial times and eve...

This paper analyzes processes of variable number agreement marking in Afro- Bolivian Spanish (ABS) Determiner Phrases (DPs). In line with several sociolinguistic studies of this kind (Guy 1981, Poplack 1979, 1980, Scherre 2001, etc.), this work provides detailed VARBRUL statistical analyses for the cases of plural marking variability found in this...

This paper provides a new analysis of the Monogenesis Hypothesis proposed by Granda (1970;1988) and more recently revisited by Schwegler (1999). In doing so, the current study offers linguistic and sociohistorical data suggesting that Chota Valley Spanish (CVS) was probably not the result of the decreolization of a previous Afro-Portuguese creole;...

The goal of this paper is to show how two commonly found linguistic features in Afro-Hispanic contact varieties can be explained as the result of advanced second language strategies and, for this reason, they do not necessary imply a previous creole stage for these languages. The features under inspection are lack of subject-verb agreement and the...