In this collection of essays, Clements takes a linguistic ecological approach to the study of several Spanish- and Portuguese-based contact varieties, past and present. Using an emergentist and usage-based paradigm, he compares a widely divergent array of linguistic and ecological environments, with the goal of demonstrating how pidgin, creole, and other mixed languages are formed and evolve. The book consists of nine chapters, an appendix, and a comprehensive bibliography.
The introductory chapter sets forth Clements' views on language processing and language change. Linguistic structure is created by routinization, which in turn is frequency-dependent; notions of universal grammar and innateness play no role in the following chapters, which provide a fine-grained analysis of specific contact-induced varieties of Spanish and Portuguese. Clements also embraces the metaphor (shared by such scholars as Croft and Mufwene) of language as species, which then places speech communities in the role of actively interbreeding populations defined by the species. In this “phylogenetic” approach, species and speech communities are defined not principally by inherent linguistic traits but rather by their shared history, and by the linguistic equivalent of interbreeding, namely the extent to which speakers consider given linguistic codes as belonging to the same or to different languages.
Following a brief chapter that outlines the social history of Spanish and Portuguese, from the Roman Empire period through the era of Spanish and Portuguese colonialism, Clements presents a chapter on Spanish- and Portuguese-lexified creole languages. Despite the chapter title, Clements accepts the view that Philippine Creole Spanish (Chabacano) is relexified from a Portuguese-derived creole originally formed in Indonesia. He also accepts the view that the Afro-Colombian creole language Palenquero and the Afro-Iberian creole Papiamentu were originally Portuguese-lexified languages, which effectively confines his discussion to Portuguese-derived creoles. This decision perhaps warrants a more extensive discussion, since it affects not only the search for etyma in the postulated source language, but also the time frames and geographical loci where the respective language contacts occurred. In accepting a Portuguese origin for these three creoles Clements has many fellow travelers, but the linguistic histories of these languages contain enough ambiguities and lacunae to make positive identification a calculated risk. After describing the sociolinguistic environment in which Portuguese was learned and used by enslaved Africans and other subaltern groups, the chapter establishes correlations between the nature of the contact situations that underlie each creole language and the use of grammatical markers. Grammatical suffixes are relatively rare in Portuguese-lexified creoles, and are found in inverse proportion to the number of languages involved in the original contact environment. In a comparative study of oblique case marking in Portuguese-derived creoles, Clements makes use of Croft's (Reference Croft1991) Causal Order Hypothesis, which divides thematic relations into antecedent (e.g. instrumental) and subsequent (e.g. benefactive) roles. Clements offers the prediction that while there may be syncretisms or portamanteau behavior for antecedent and subsequent roles, there should be few or no syncretisms that cross the temporal boundary represented by this dichotomy. In his survey, Clements finds antecedent-subsequent syncrectisms only in some Asian Portuguese creoles, which he attributes to contact-induced convergence with local languages. Although the examples are largely taken from second-hand sources (except for Clements' own research on Indo-Portuguese creoles), the general pattern of case marking in these languages is supported.
Attention is then directed to the Spanish-derived pidgins once spoken in colonial Cuba by African-born slaves known as bozales, from a Spanish term meaning ‘untamed.' Although some scholars have postulated that Cuban bozal Spanish coalesced into a creole, and may even have constituted a relexification of a Portuguese-derived creole formed in West Africa, Clements challenges this viewpoint with an array of data. First he presents an examination of literary imitations and anthropological accounts of Afro-Cuban speech, which shows little of the internal consistency and grammatical innovations typical of Afro-Atlantic creoles. He then discusses unpublished correspondence from 1835 between the American encyclopedist Francis Lieber and the Cuban intellectual José de la Luz (the original text and a translation are in the appendix). In this remarkable exchange, Lieber had queried his Cuban correspondent as to the possible existence of a Spanish-derived creole language among Afro-Cubans. De la Luz responded in detail, demonstrating knowledge of other creole languages such as Haitian Creole, and denying that Afro-Cuban speech had creolized. The Cuban writer offered detailed comments on bozal language in the earliest known non-fictional account, and the only explicit commentary on the linguistic structures used by colonial Afro-Cubans.
Another major linguistic presence in several Spanish-American countries during the 19th century were Chinese immigrants, first recruited as agricultural laborers and later moving to urban areas. The largest Chinese population was found in Cuba, where elements of Chinese culture, such as the numbers lottery known as the chararada china ‘Chinese charade' penetrated the lives of all Cubans. The first Chinese field laborers worked alongside African-born bozales as well as Afro-Cubans who spoke Spanish natively, and some literary imitations of Chinese workers' attempts at speaking Spanish hint at the presence of bozal Afro-Cuban pidginized Spanish. Clements devotes a chapter to Chinese Cuban Spanish, portrayed not as a stable pidgin but rather as a series of individual learners' grammars that never coalesced into a stable code, but were replaced by natively spoken Spanish in subsequent generations. In support of this assertion, Clements offers another chapter on the Spanish interlanguage of contemporary Chinese immigrants in Spain. Although (usually inaccurate) stereotypes of “Chinese” Spanish are found throughout the Spanish-speaking world, Clements' chapter represents the first linguistic analysis of actually occurring Spanish-Chinese interlanguage. The study focuses on two immigrants, whose social and linguistic interactions with Spanish speakers differ considerably, as do their resultant grammars of Spanish. Although the speech of these two Chinese learners of Spanish is replete with inconsistencies and massive grammatical simplification, in both instances the speakers appear to be employing strategies characteristic of emergent grammars, including restructured pronominal systems, tense and aspect particles, and null copulas. The importance of this demonstration lies in the possibility to observe (in miniature) in real time a linguistic contact environment similar to those from which Asian-Portuguese creoles developed. In conjunction with the analysis of Cuban bozal Spanish and Portuguese-lexified creoles, these chapters are offered as negative evidence of the creolization of Spanish in Spanish-American plantation environments, and further highlight the linguistic and social conditions propitious to creolization.
A chapter on Andean Spanish covers a variety of contact phenomena attributable to Quechua influence in the Andean highlands of South America, particularly Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia. Clements compares grammatical structures from two speech communities, one in Peru, and the other in northwestern Argentina; in the first, Quechua is still spoken in surrounding areas, although not in the community in question, while in Argentina the former Quechua presence has disappeared. Among the features surveyed are object-verb word order, object clitic placement and clitic doubling as well as non-argument (pleonastic) clitics, use of diminutive suffixes with ameliorative value, doubly signaled possessives, and gerunds used with adverbial force. In each instance, a Quechua substratum combination is postulated, sometimes involving direct transfer or calquing, and in other cases the result of reanalysis based on accidental similarities or misidentification of grammatical functions. This chapter advances research on substrate influences on Andean Spanish, which are often claimed but seldom substantiated in a systematic fashion. Because of the richness of detail, the chapter also stands as a template for research on other Spanish and Portuguese dialects characterized by past or present contact with other languages.
The final data-oriented chapter offers an analysis of the Portuguese dialect of Barrancos, in southeastern Portugal on the border with Spain. This region has historically shifted back and forth between Spanish and Portugal control, and the Spanish language has always occupied a prominent position. The contemporary Barranquenho dialect is essentially a variety of Portuguese, but with some southern Spanish phonetic traits, including aspiration/elision of word-final /s/, loss of word-final /r/, and neutralization of the opposition /b/-/v/. Some Spanish morphosyntactic patterns are also found in Barranquenho, such as the use of indirect object clitics in conjunction with indirect object nouns, the preverbal position of object clitics, and use of the gerund with progressive constructions, instead of the contemporary Portuguese infinitive although the gerund construction was common in Portugal until well into the 19th century and may be an archaism in Barrancos, reinforced but not caused by the homologous construction in Spanish. The Barranquenho data stand in contrast to other Spanish-Portuguese contact environments, e.g. in South America where more intertwining of the two languages is found, and expand insights into the interaction of linguistic and social variables in shaping the outcome of language contact.
The book concludes with a summary chapter, in which Clements reiterates the position that language develops from usage, and that grammar emerges from discourse. Throughout the individual vignettes, emergent structures, whether in idiolectal immigrants' speech or stable regional languages, are correlated with general bootstrapping mechanisms and grammatical principles. This is a decidedly Lamarckian view of the evolution of language as species, i.e. the view that change is purposeful and stems from structural and social pressures, rather than representing simply the sedimentation of originally random and unprincipled variation.
In the balance, Clements offers a picturesque and instructive journey through time and space, bringing together well-known and little-known contact varieties of Spanish and Portuguese, and tying together seemingly disparate evolutionary pathways into a plausible framework of linguistic ecology. He is to be commended on his steadfast reliance on primary data and the dynamic reality of speech communities, and for banishing from his chapters any mention of theoretical constructs that cannot be tested by confrontation with the facts at hand. This is a work of mature scholarship that will benefit both spectators and protagonists of the study of language contact.
