Abstract
AbstractOne of the most salient putative African features of Palenquero, an Afro-Hispanic creole spoken in northern Colombia, is the prenominal plural marker ma. However, plural number is not categorically marked with ma, which alternates with bare forms in plural contexts and also occurs in singular contexts. In a principled sample of noun phrases (n = 1,186) from the spontaneous speech of twenty-seven Palenquero-Spanish bilinguals, the rate of ma (versus zero) is 51% in plural and 13% in singular contexts. Singular ma is favored with subjects and specific objects, consistent with an association with definiteness. In plural contexts, where it is robust, selection of ma is favored with specific and generic referents in subject role. This conditioning indicates that plural marking is favored for discourse referential nouns, in accordance with the cross-linguistic generalization that morphological marking tends to appear on instances that approach the prototypical function of a category (Hopper & Thompson, 1984).
Highlights
Typological approaches highlight multiple patterns of number marking crosslinguistically
Ma does not categorically “mark” plurality, as seen in (2), where a bare form occurs in a plural context, or in (3), where ma occurs in a singular context. (In the examples, we gloss ma as PL and use Ø to indicate the absence of ma, for ease of identification.)
Multivariate analysis of plural contexts showed us that when all factor groups are considered simultaneously, specificity and syntactic role are the clear winners
Summary
Typological approaches highlight multiple patterns of number marking crosslinguistically. There are languages that exhibit singular and plural forms, while others have additional dual, trial, quadral, and paucal number values (e.g., Corbett & Mithun, 1996:2). There are constraints on plural marking in the languages of the world (Croft, 2003:134). The marking of plurality on nouns can be determined by animacy and referentiality hierarchies, or topicality constraints (Corbett, 2000; Corbett & Mithun, 1996; Croft, 2003:134). It has been noted that the putative plural marker in PL differs substantially from Spanish. PL friend POSS HAB learn DET PL culture that we have there ‘My friends learn about the culture that we have there.’ (Male, 27, Recording 65, 04:15)
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