a minimalist approach to gender agreement in the afro-bolivian dp

Folia Linguistica 45/2 (2011), 465488.issn 01654004, e-issn 16147308 Mouton de Gruyter Societas Linguistica Europaeadoi 10.1515/flin.2011.017

Gender agreement in the Afro-Bolivian DP

A Minimalist approach to gender agreement in the Afro-Bolivian DP: Variation and the specification of uninterpretable features

Sandro Sessarego & Javier Gutirrez-RexachUniversity of Wisconsin, Madison and The Ohio State University

This article analyzes gender-agreement variation in the Determiner Phrase (DP) of Afro-Bolivian Spanish (ABS). We claim that this is an instance of cross-generational change, consisting in the systematic substitution of stigmatized basilectal Afro-Bolivian features with more prestigious Bolivian Spanish ones. In light of recent minimalist models, the variability encountered in the corpus can be accounted for systematically as a by-product of the differential specification of uninterpretable features in a derivation. This study highlights an on-going process of post-bozal Spanish approximation to a more prestigious Spanish variety. Such transition seems to be driven by social factors and is significantly regulated by syntactic constraints.

Keywords: Afro-Bolivian Spanish, gender agreement, determiner phrase, variation, feature specification, minimalism

1. Introduction

This article evaluates variation in the gender-agreement system of Afro-Bolivian Spanish, an Afro-Hispanic vernacular developed from what was once a bozal language spoken in Los Yungas, Department of La Paz, Bolivia. We present data showing evidence of cross-generational change, consisting of the systematic substitution of stigmatized basilectal Afro-Bolivian features with more prestigious Bolivian Spanish ones. One of the outcomes of this situation is the transition from one gender-agreement system to another one. The purpose of this work is to shed light on the

466 Sandro Sessarego & Javier Gutirrez-Rexach

linguistic constraints regulating gender agreement within a theoretical framework capable of accounting for the variability encountered in this specific transition. African slavery persisted in Bolivia from the very beginning of its colo-nization, in the first decades of the sixteenth century, until 1826, when in the new constitution, immediately after independence from Spain, slaves were declared free. Slavery was formally reestablished in 1830, but it was abolished again in 1831. Nevertheless, in practice, until the Land Reform of 1952, it represented a common practice, so that Afro-Bolivians had no other choice but to work for their owners. The date of the introduction of forced African labor to Los Yungas is not clear. The first records suggesting a significant number of slaves in the area date from the eighteenth century. They are documents concerning the inventory of goods belonging to some plantations, or sale certificates that attested the passage from one owner to another (Portugal Ortiz 1977: 7783). Since that period until 1952, when the Land Reform took place, Afro-Bolivians have been employed in Los Yungas as slaves in haciendas. After the Land Reform, a majority remained in the region, becoming the new owners of small parcels from the land that once belonged to plantations. Even though Afro-Yungueos are now-adays free people and their life conditions have improved during the last 60 years, their situation is far from being optimal, as the daily per-capita income, mostly derived from growing and selling coffee and coca, does not even reach $4 (Lipski 2005). All contemporary Afro-Yungueos speak a variety of Highland Boliv-ian Spanish (HBS), which may be more or less influenced by the traditional Afro-Bolivian dialect according to the speakers level of education and mobility outside of Yungas. Typically, until 1952 black workers were not allowed to attend school. Several older members of these communities are therefore illiterate. However, after that date, the hacienda system ended and basic public education began to develop in Afro-Yungueo communities. The study of Spanish at schools resulted in a gradual drop of the traditional dialect. This process has been described as a systematic substitution of stig-matized basilectal ABS features with more prestigious HBS ones (Lipski 2006a). As far as ABS gender marking is concerned, this substitution is not random. Rather, what can be observed is the transition from one agree-ment system to another one, according to specific syntactic constrains. The focus of the present study is on the linguistic implications of this transition. The remainder of the article is organized as follows: section 2

Gender agreement in the Afro-Bolivian DP 467

is a brief illustration of ABS DP features; section3 elaborates on certain methodological issues; section4 describes the attested gender-agreement patterns; sections 5 and 6 provide a formal analysis of the phenomena; sec-tion7 presents the statistical results; finally, section8 interprets the struc-tural repercussions of our findings, and section9 contains our conclusions.

2. Afro-Bolivian Spanish DP features

Lipski (2006b) describes five quintessential features of the traditional Afro-Yungueo DP which distinguish this dialect from other Spanish varieties: (a) lack of noun-adjective gender agreement; (b) invariant plurals, that is, no plural suffixes on nouns, adjectives, or determiners; (c) use of a single invariant definite article; (d) elimination of definite articles in generic con-structions; and (e), frequently, the retention of plural /s/ only on the first element of plural NP. Instances of (a) and (b) are exemplified in (1). (1) a. Siempre cont-aba algun-o-s cosa.

always tell-PST some-M-PL thing.F.SG She always told some things.b. es-o-s fiesta this-M-PL party.F.SG these parties

Lipski notices that inflection is more likely to appear on determiners and prenominal adjectives, while postnominal adjectives present a lower rate of concord (2).

(2) a. con la gente antig-o with the.F.SG people.F.SG old-M.SG with the old peopleb. es-a-s casa chic-o this-F-PL house.F.SG small-M.SG those small houses

Interestingly, no cases of postnominal agreement have been reported, unless the prenominal elements agree too. With respect to (c), a robust presence of the invariant plural definite article (lu) is attested in ABS. (3) a. lu taza

the.M.PL cup.F.SG the cup


b. lu juama the.M.PL family.F.SG the families

Definite articles may also be eliminated in argument position (d) leading to a generic reading, while such a reading requires the use of the article in standard Spanish (4).

(4) a. Perr-o ta floj-o. dog-M.SG is worthless-M.SG Dogs are worthless.b. Patrn huasqui-aba muj. landowner.M.SG beat-PST woman.F.SG The landowners beat the women.

The last quintessential Afro-Bolivian DP feature reported is the frequent retention of plural /s/ only on the first element of plural NP (e), as illus-trated in (5).

(5) a. es-o-s dirigente this-M-SG leader.M.SG these leadersb. en idioma antig-o di mi-s abuel-o in language.M.SG old-M.SG of my-PL grandparent-M.SG in the old language of my grandparents

For the purpose of this article, only tokens involving gender agreement across the DP (a, c) are analyzed, leaving the study of number marking (b, e) and bare nouns (d) for further research (Delicado-Cantero & Sessarego 2010).

3. Methodology

Formal syntactic theories have traditionally been built on partly-idealized standard languages, on the basis of well-formedness judgements from a limited set of informants. This methodology produced an impressive amount of data, generalizations and insights, mostly because it abstracted away from certain kinds of empirical complexities (Barbiers 2009: 1608). Yet, for these same reasons, such a model has often been criticized by socio-linguists, who instead base their observations on bigger corpora of natural-istic production data, and have developed several techniques to study the


real vernacular, namely, the real language spoken by people when paying no metalinguistic attention to their speech (Labov 1972). Recent works on microvariation attempt to combine these previously contrasting approaches to compare a speakers intuitions with real pro-duction data, with the goal of developing more fine-grained, empirically-testable generalizations (Cornips & Poletto 2005). In collecting data for microparametric analysis, it is therefore crucial to gather both grammat-icality judgments as well as naturalistic data. For this reason, the inform-ants who participated in the study were first interviewed and then asked to answer grammaticality judgments from an oral questionnaire. Atotal of 13 recorded interviews, lasting an hour or more each, were conducted during July 2008 with Afro-Bolivian speakers residing in the communities of Tocaa, Mururata and Chijchipa, North Yungas. The informants were native speakers of the dialect who did not speak any other language spoken in Bolivia, such as Quechua or Aymara. The interviews were conducted by letting the informant talk about any topic of their liking and asking them follow-up questions, in line with the principle of Tangen-tial Shift (Labov 1984: 37).1 The goal was reducing the Observers Paradox (Labov 1972) as much as possible. Only later, usually after one or two days from the time of the interview, the same informant was asked for gram-maticality judgments. This was done in order to not disrupt the outcome of the interview by telling the speaker the nature of the phenomena under analysis in advance. Responses on acceptability-judgment tasks rely at least in part on expli-cit, prescriptive notions held by the speakers (Cornips & Poletto 2005). One way of diminishing this effect, which proved successful according to the experimental methods described in Labov (1984), is to ask for gram-maticality judgments in an indirect way. Thus, to discover whether or not a variable was present in the community, not only the direct intuitions were elicited: Do you judge X a grammatical/better sentence than Y?; Can you say X?; also indirect questions were asked: Is variant X present in this community?; Do you know anybody who can say X?

1 According to the Principle of Tangential Shift, interviews may be arranged into a network of topics which do not need to be followed according to a prescribed sequence. The con-versation between the interviewer and the informant should start with the least personal questions and progress, step by step, toward more intimate topics. The shift between topics should be as smooth as possible. It should be based on follow-up questions to what has just been said by the informant.


The comparison of these two different sources of data resulted in the interesting but not unexpected finding that almost everybody who claimed not to say X, but to know people who could say it, were found using X or something structurally similar several times during the natural-istic interview. This would indicate that such a structure was indeed part of their grammar and confirmed the importance of relying on different sources. While grammaticality judgments can give us a good insight into the abstract idealized language of an informant, only a comparison of such information with empirical data can help us build a robust fine-grained generalization.

4. The grammar of gender agreement, a variable one?

With respect to what pertains to DP gender-agreement operations, gram-maticality judgments, oral questionnaires and indirect questions indi-cated the presence of several possible patterns. Different informants indi-cated that in the most traditional ABS variety gender agreement occurs only on singular definite articles, while the rest of the DP elements show default-masculine concord, as shown in (6). These findings are in line with the data presented by Lipski (2009) for the most traditional dialect. However, the examples in (6) must not be considered an observed pat-tern but rather a reported one; in fact, none of our informants recognized (6) as their own grammar; nevertheless, the Afro-Bolivians interviewed indicated that some people in their community use these more traditional constructions.

(6) a. tod-o la comida delicios-o all-M.SG the.F.SG food.F.SG delicious-M.SG all the delicious foodb. tod-o lu comida delicios-o all-M.SG the.M.PL food.F.SG delicious-M.SG all the delicious foodsc. est-e/es-e comida delicios-o this/that-M.SG food-F.SG delicious-M.SG this/that delicious foodd. much-o/un comida delicios-o much/a-M.SG food-F.SG delicious-M.SG much/a delicious food


One subject (1/13) presented the grammatical intuitions exemplified in (7). He showed gender agreement on plural and singular definite articles and demonstratives, but not on other categories.

(7) a. tod-o la comida delicios-o all-M.SG the.F.SG food.F.SG delicious-M.SG all the delicious foodb. tod-o las comida delicios-o all-M.SG the.F.PL food.F.SG delicious-M.SG all the delicious foodsc. est-a/es-a comida delicios-o this/that-F.SG food.F.SG delicious-M.SG this/that delicious foodd. much-o/un comida delicios-o much/a.M.SG food.F.SG delicious-M.SG much/a delicious food

The majority of the informants (7/13) used agreement on plural and sin-gular definite articles, demonstratives, pre-nominal adjectives, and also on weak quantifiers2 (8):

(8) much-a/un-a comida delicios-omuch/a-F.SG food-F.SG delicious-M.SGmuch/a delicious food

The last group (5/13) claimed to use gender agreement for all the elements, including strong quantifiers and post-nominal adjectives (9):

(9) tod-a la comida delicios-aall-F.SG the.F.SG food.F.SG delicious-F.SGall that delicious food

This would intuitively lead us to argue in favor of four different gram-mars; however, a closer look at the empirical data from the oral interviews complicates the picture. In fact, it was common for somebody to claim to speak a certain grammar but use patterns belonging to another. Some-times, speakers would freely alternate between forms within the same sen-

2 Since Milsarks dissertation (1974), natural-language quantifiers have been classified into two different groups, called weak and strong quantifiers. Weak quantifiers (some, many, etc.) can occur in existential (there) sentences. On the other hand, strong quantifiers (all, most, etc.) cannot. Milsark suggests that this phenomenon would be due to the fact that strong quantifiers refer to subsets of previously established sets, while weak quantifiers establish such sets and for this reason can occur in existential constructions.


tence. For example, the conversation fragment in (10) is from an informant whose grammaticality judgments indicated a grammar of type (9): (10) Tod-o la comunidad particip-aba; much-a gente

all-M.SG the.F.SG community.F.SG participate-PST much-F.SG people.F.SGven-a, much-o gente ven-a desde lejos. come-PST much-M.SG people.F.SG come-PST from farTod-a-s, todit-a-s la-s persona-s se reun-an.all-F-PL all-F-PL the.F-PL people-F-SG REFL meet-PSTMuy bonit-o la fiesta era...very nice-M.SG the.F-SG party.F.SG be-PSTAll the community used to participate, many people used to come, many people used to come from far away. All, all the people gathered. The party was very nice...

Speakers like this present gender agreement on strong quantifiers in 50 to 60 percent of instances, thus indicating that cases of agreement mis-matches are very common and should not be regarded as just E-language errors.

5. Variation and checking relations

The study of language variation seems at first to be at odds with formal linguistic analyses that strive to hypothesize principles and generalizations based on Universal Grammar. Nevertheless, in the Principles and Para-meters paradigm, several attempts were made to capture dialectal and inter-speaker variation, exploring the notion of parametric variation and, in the last decade, fine-graining it to include so-called micro parameters (Beninc 1989; Kayne 1996; etc). Language-internal variation, on the other hand, has traditionally been excluded from formal linguistic analyses. However, during the last years, several scholars have taken into account variation beyond the usual parametric inter-language domain (Adger & Smith 2005; Adger 2006). Individual variation becomes the core of linguis-tic research, bringing previously disregarded phenomena considered as belonging to E-language to the fore (Adger & Trousdale 2007). The advent of the Minimalist Program entailed a derivational approach that was inconsistent with parameter-based accounts. Thus, an extension of the parameter/micro-parameter idea to individual variation seems to not be a straightforward matter. In the most recent formulations of the


Minimalist Program (Chomsky 2001, 2002, 2006), syntactic derivations are viewed as strictly dependent on feature valuation and checking. The distinction between interpretable and non-interpretable features, though controversial, has proven very useful. Several features have an interpret-ation at LF, thus they are semantically-interpretable features. Other fea-tures, however, lack such semantic import and are present to trigger the necessary merger or agreement operations during the derivation. Said uninterpretable features have to be matched via Agree and are finally deleted before Spell-out. Given these theoretical assumptions, the Minimalist Program seems to show enough promise to account for important aspects of variation because it admits several phonological outputs for a given semantic interpretation. Adger & Smith (2005) argue for characterizing syntactic variation in terms of (un)interpretable features. Certain uninterpretable features may be pre-sent in one category but absent in another one. Since they are uninter-pretable, they would have no semantic repercussion, thus being equally legitimate for a convergent derivation. Therefore, variation is reduced to the specification of the uninterpretable features in a derivation (Adger & Smith 2005: 161). As expected, syntax per se remains invariable or perfect (Brody 1997), given that variation is located only in the lexical component. Variation will occur when one item or other enters the numeration and takes part in a syntactic derivation. Such (variable) underspecification for gender is what we observe when analyzing the ABS DP. Several (social) factors may affect the outcome: ease of lexical access (probably linked to frequency of use), speaker-hearer relationships, age, gender, social identity, etc. (Adger & Smith 2005: 164). Due to the reduced number of participants, we are not in the position to provide a detailed sociolinguistic analysis of the phenomenon; nevertheless, we will comment on the effect of the fac-tor age in patterning gender-agreement variation and cross-generational agreement evolution.

6. Agreement and valuation

Taking the array of DP features described in section2 into account, ABS has been classified by Lipski (2006c: 9) as a case of DP impoverished agree-ment. Lipski suggests that gender and number features in DP percolate up from the noun to the determiner and eventually to the post-nominal


element. He considers data from several speakers of different ages and lev-els of education presenting variable gender-agreement configurations, and he notices that no case of post-nominal gender concord is found unless pre-nominal elements agree, as shown in (11): (11) a. un-a curva anch-a

a-F.SG curve.F.SG large-F.SGb. un-a curva anch-o a-F.SG curve.F.SG large-M.SGc. un curva anch-o a.M.SG curve.F.SG large-M.SGd. *un curva anch-a a.M.SG curve.F.SG large-F.SG alarge curve

Our data, when analyzed cross-generationally, are generally in line with those reported by Lipski. However, an important difference can be noticed in the speech of several informants. Many speakers present almost a com-plete lack of gender agreement in strong quantifiers (Milsark 1974), as shown in (12) and also in examples (6)(9): (12) a. tod-o la-s cosa bonit-o

all-M.SG the.F-PL thing.F.SG nice-M.SG all the nice housesb. tod-o la chic-a de Tocaa all-M.SG the.F.SG girl-F.SG of Tocaa all girls from Tocaac. tod-o la comunidad all-M.SG the-F.SG community.F.SG all the community

Cases like these seem to violate the pre-nominal to post-nominal percola-tion order, unless we postulate that strong quantifiers are elements exter-nal to the DP, and then we argue independently in favor of a different mechanism for the checking of the gender feature in languages where they agree in gender and number with N, like Standard Spanish. Additionally, the feature-percolation account of gender agreement runs into problems when compared with data from other Romance varieties in which post-nominal adjectives may agree with N and disagree with D (cf. Pomino & Stark 2009 for Fassano Ladin). Alternatively, one might propose a system with one or more agreement projections inside DP and with the relevant displacement operations applied to agreeing elements so that they enter


into a specifier-head relation (Sportiche 2002, Koopman 1997). This type of approach would be problematic too in that the number of internal agree-ment projections required would not be limited, and would most likely be established on an ad-hoc basis. It also runs against recent minimalist ideas supporting the elimination of Agreement projections (Chomsky 2002). For these reasons, an account of gender agreement based on a minimal-ist model seems more adequate to describe the phenomena found ABS. Within the minimalist framework, gender agreement is conceived as the result of valuation processes which do not necessarily require movement but just a configurational feature-checking mechanism (Picallo 2008). Gender agreement, in fact, involves the transmission or sharing of fea-tures with nominal origin to other lexical items (adjectives) or to func-tional elements (determiners, quantifiers). Neither the demonstrative nor the adjective comes from the lexicon with a value for gender. The gender feature of determiners and adjectives is lexically unvalued (Chomsky 2001) and becomes valued as a consequence of a syntactic process of agreement with the gender feature of the noun (cf. Pesetsky & Torrego 2007). Recent work on agreement operations advocates a version of agree-ment which departs from the previous view of this operation as a feature assignment mechanism (Chomsky 2000). Rather, the process is seen as an instance of feature sharing (Frampton & Gutmann 2000; Pesetsky & Tor-rego 2007), in line with the view of agreement as feature unification preva-lent in the HPSG framework (Pollard & Sag 1994). Within the probe-goal theory of the syntactic computation, the operation Agree can be formally defined as in (13).

(13) Agree (Pesetsky & Torrego 2007: 4)a. An unvalued feature F (a probe) on a head H at syntactic location

(F) scans its c-command domain for another instance of F (a goal) at location (F) with which to agree.

b. Replace F with F, so that the same feature is present in both locations.

If a goal is valued for F, replacing the token-value of the probe with the value of the goal results in an instance of valued F substituting for the spe-cification of the unvalued probe. Avalued F may now serve as the goal for some ulterior operation of Agree triggered by an unvalued, higher instance of F serving as a new probe. The result is that a single feature F will be shared by several positions, and the process could iterate further.


An element drawn from the lexicon with an interpretable valued feature will be specified as i(nterpretable)F(eature)[val]; an uninterpretable unval-ued feature that has not participated in Agree is annotated (where relevant) by an empty pair of brackets ( uF [ ]) and, after the Agree operation takes place, it turns into uF [val]. On the other hand, an element coming from the lexicon without a specification for such a feature, will be annotated as no-F [ ], and it will not be able to act as a probe for Agree operations of that particular kind. (14) uF [val] . . . uF [val] . . . iF [val] . . . uF [val] . . . no-F [ ]

If we postulate that an uninterpretable feature such as gender may be pre-sent in certain nominal elements but absent in others, and that variation is the result of lexical differences in the feature specification of certain items, it follows that contrasts in overt syntax will be the result of differences in the computation of varying specifications. We propose an account of the different gender-agreement configurations across DP strings in ABS that can be summarized in the following fashion:

(15) a. [DP una [NP curva ancha] uG [fem] . . . . . . iG [fem] . . . . . . . . . . uG [fem]b. [DP una [NP curva ancho] uG [fem] . . . . . . iG [fem] . . . . . . . . . . no-G []c. [DP un [NP curva ancho] no-G [] . . . . . . . . iG [fem] . . . . . . . . . . no-G []d. [DP a [NP curve large] alarge curve

Therefore, this approach can account for all the gender-agreement con-figurations encountered in the ABS Determiner Phrase by postulating the presence/absence of unvalued gender features on the different DP com-ponents. Having clarified this point, we can now proceed to solve a dif-ferent empirical issue, namely why no instances of post-nominal gender concord can be found on adjectives unless pre-nominal articles agree (11), in both Lipskis (2006c) and our corpus.

7. Changes in feature valuation

Results from statistical analyses (Sessarego 2009) suggest that ABS is undergoing a cross-generational change, in which stigmatized basilectal


ABS features are being substituted by more prestigious HBS ones. One result of this transition is the introduction of a wider range of gender-agreement configurations in a language which originally made little use of it. In minimalist terms, this phenomenon can be seen as the emergence and development of unvalued features on elements which previously were not specified for them. The non-occurrence of strings like (16) might indicate that, cross-gen-erationally, indefinite articles developed an unvalued gender-feature spe-cification before post-nominal adjectives. Therefore, speakers mastering post-nominal agreement would also present concord on indefinite articles.

(16) a. *[DP un [NP curva ancha] no-G [] . . . . . . . iG [fem] . . . . . . . . . . . uG [fem] [DP a [NP curve large] alarge curveb. [DP una [NP curva ancho] uG [fem] . . . . . iG [fem] . . . . . . . . . . . no-G [fem] [DP a [NP curve large] alarge curve

Ahypothesis that emerges from this data is that unvalued gender features developed gradually in ABS: first on certain elements (e.g. articles) and only later on others (e.g. strong quantifiers, adjectives). Although this is the general tendency, different linguistic and social factors may affect the selec-tion of an item or other, and therefore the overt syntax result. Such vari-ation can probably be modeled in sociolinguistic terms. Nevertheless, the reduced number of participants in our survey does not allow us to conduct a complete sociolinguistic analysis here. We will leave this study for further research. In the present article we will only comment on cross-generational differences and on the probability of nominal gender agreement associated with different lexical and functional categories. Findings from grammaticality judgments, oral questionnaires and indirect questions led to the identification of four different patterns of agreement (see 610). However, the comparison of such results with the data recorded by means of sociolinguistic interviews revealed a consid-erable amount of variability between the grammatical intuitions ideally assumed or accepted by the speakers and the patterns attested in the actual survey, thus indicating that agreement paradigms may be not completely stable in the grammar of these informants. For these reasons, the model


proposed by Adger & Smith (2005) to account for unvalued uninterpre-able features seems ideal to capture the nature of the phenomena found in ABS. The nature of the element occurring with the nominal head (e.g. articles, adjectives, strong/weak quantifiers, etc.), has a clear effect on the output; however, not only internal factors condition the agreement oper-ation, there are also external ones playing a crucial role. Acloser look at the interview transcripts revealed that gender mismatches on adjectives and determiners between ABS and Standard HBS are common, with the mas-culine gender prevailing over the feminine one. We claim that these differ-ences are due to two separate factors: (a) Certain words listed in the HBS lexicon as feminine are listed in the ABS one as masculine and vice versa; (b) The valuation process of agreement in ABS departs from the standard Spanish one in that certain ABS elements lack the unvalued features pre-sent in their Spanish counterparts. While grammaticality judgments were discordant for certain syntactic categories among informants, every participant agreed on the use of el and la as respectively the masculine singular definite article and the feminine singular definite one. Lipski (2009) reports no instances in ABS where el is used with nouns that are grammatically feminine in HBS, while he com-ments on some cases in which la is used with nouns that are grammatically masculine in HBS. Compare examples in (17) with their Spanish counter-parts: el pulmn the chest, el patio the doorway.

(17) a. Mi quit-a mi gorro pa pon- aqu la pulmn. to.me take-PRS my.SG hat.M.SG to put-INF here the.F.SG chest.F.SG He takes off my hat to put it here over my chest.b. Yo lleg-aba la patio. I arrive-PST the.F.SG doorway.F.SG Iarrived to the doorway.

On the other hand, our corpus includes several cases indicating that agree-ment mismatches involving definite articles can be found under both con-ditions, thus suggesting that a differential lexical specification exists and is bidirectional. Compare the ABS examples in (18) with their Spanish coun-terparts: la maxima autoridad the top authority, la serpiente the snake; el problema the problem, el sistema the system.

(18) a. l dic-e que es el mxim-o autoridad. he say-PRS that is the.M.SG maximum-M.SG authority.F.SG He says he is the top authority.


b. El serpiente no se com-e; se mat-a con escopeta. the.M.SG snake.F.SG no REFL eat-PRS REFL kill-PRS with rifle.F.SG The snake cannot be eaten; it must be killed with a rifle.c. La problema de Tocaa era lu patrn. the.F.SG problem.F.SG of Tocaa is-PST the.M.PL owner.M.SG The land owners were the problem of Tocaa.d. La sistema de hacienda no sirv-e pa nada. the.F.SG system.F.SG of plantation no work-PRS for nothing The plantation system is useless.

Setting aside those mismatches that are due to different specifications in the lexicon, all the others have to be viewed as the by-product of a specific valuation constraint, which is conditioned by the type of grammatical cat-egory entering the derivation with the nominal head. Cross-generational VARBRUL results for internal factors (Table 1) indicate that the unvalued gender-feature distribution among grammatical categories is highly vari-able (Range 72): post-nominal adjectives disagree the most (Factor Weight .95), while plural and singular definite articles show the highest level of concord (Factor Weight .23). Within a variationist minimalist framework, several external factors may affect the selection of an item: ease of lexical access (probably linked to frequency of use), speaker-hearer relationships, gender, social identity, age, etc. (Adger & Smith 2005: 164). Quantitative results not only provide

Table 1. Cross-generational variable rule analysis of the contribution of internal factors to the probability of lack of gender agreement in Afro-Bolivian DP

Grammatical category

Factor weight

%Lack agreement N %data

Post-Nom. Adj. .95 50 272 19Strong Q. .66 35 275 11Pre-Nom. Adj. .64 14 220 19Indef. Art. .62 12 280 11Weak Q .60 10 102 4Dem .24 3 84 3Def. Art. .23 2 1371 53

Range72

Total = 2604; log likelihood = 624.215; total chi-square = 202.0101; chi-square/cell = 21.6291; significance = 0.001; input = 0.041


empirical support for a structural analysis, they also provide more evidence for microvariation between closely related grammatical systems exhibiting orderly heterogenity which can, in turn, be correlated with external vari-ables (Cornips & Corrigan 2005: 7). While the reduced number of inform-ants does not allow a complete sociolinguistic analysis, it is worth point-ing out that the age factor significantly affects variation in this case (see Table 2). Generation is, in fact, a significant factor group (Range 32), with the oldest group (80+) strongly favoring disagreement (Factor Weight .67) and the 2150 group disfavoring it (Factor Weight .35). These data reflect the presence of a cross-generational change, pushing ABS in the direction of HBS. Young generations did not experience the segregation imposed by the hacienda system and had more chances to have contact with the Span-ish variant spoken outside the community. These conditioning elements, in addition to the stigmatization attached to the Afro-Hispanic vernacular, are pushing the younger members of the community to quickly replace the basilectal features with more prestigious HBS ones.3

3 Processes of this kind have been labeled as cases of decreolization in the literature (DeCamp 1971; Bickerton 1973; Rickford 1987; Winford 1997). The notion of decreolization consists of a series of linguistic approximations ranging from the creole to the superstrate language. This term, therefore, seems to efficiently describe the gradual shift in gender-agreement patterns found in ABS. Nevertheless, we would like to point out that the term decreolization could be a bit misleading in that it might lead people to wrongly assume that ABS was once a radical creole, a language derived from an earlier pidgin stage (Lipski 2009: 186). On the other hand, in line with the sociohistorical evidence provided by Ses-sarego (2010a, b), we would like to claim that ABS did not evolve from a pidgin, as it was probably a language which highly resembled the superstrate from its inception. Obviously, during the last decades especially after 1952 ABS has approximated standard Spanish even more. This, however, does not imply that before such date ABS was radically different.

Table 2. Cross-generational variable rule analysis of the contribution of external factors to the probability of lack of gender agreement in Afro-Bolivian DP

Generation Factor weight %Lack agreement N %data

80+ .67 21 651 255180 .56 11 927 362150 .35 1 1026 39

Range32

Total = 2604; log likelihood = 624.215; total chi-square = 202.0101; chi-square/cell = 21.6291; significance = 0.001; input = 0.041


Although there are no wider diachronic data available, looking at the synchronic results for the three generations under analysis, a clear picture emerges of how the gender-agreement domain might have expanded in ABS. The statistical findings presented in Table 1 and 2 give only a par-tial sketch of how unvalued gender feature might have developed. Only if we look at the result for each generation individually, gender-agreement development patterns become clearer.

8. The dynamics of gender feature domains

The above data have a clear structural repercussion. As the syntactic trees in Figures 1 to 3 show, the gender-feature domain is locally limited in the syntactic representation. DP constituents are arranged in a hierarchical order, according to their syntactic position (see Bosque & Gutirrez-Rexach 2010): strong quantifiers, demonstratives/definite articles, weak

DP

No-G[ ] STRONG Q 39%(29/59) uG[fem] DEMDEF ART 96%(306/319) uG[fem] WEAK Q 81%(95/117) uG[fem] PRE-NOM ADJ 74%(42/57)

iG[fem] no-G[ ] NOUN POST-NOM ADJ 21%(21/98)

Figure 1. Gender agreement patterns for the 80+ generation according to grammatical category (percentages and raw numbers)

Gender feature domain


quantifiers, pre-nominal adjectives, nouns and post-nominal adjectives. As can be observed, nouns carry an interpretable valued gender feature iG [fem], while other elements present uninterpretable valued gender fea-tures uG [fem], or no gender features altogether no-G [ ]. As can be noticed, the three generations show three different levels of gender agreement. While for the 81+ generation agreement is mainly lim-ited to demonstrative, definite articles, weak quantifiers and pre-nominal adjectives; for generation 5180 also strong quantifiers agree in the major-ity of instances. On the other hand, post-nominal adjectives agree more than 50% of the cases only for the 2150 generation informants. Gender-agreement evolution seems to develop cross-generationally in a systematic way. In fact, for all the three figures, the following gender-agree-ment ranking is maintained across the grammatical categories analyzed:

(19) DEM/DEF ART > WEAK Q > PRE-NOM ADJ > STRONG Q > POST-NOM ADJ

This hierarchy, in addition to the fact that all singular definite articles agree

DP



Figure 2. Gender agreement patterns for the 5180 generation according to grammatical category (percentages and raw numbers)



with the gender of the noun, might indicate that in a previous phase gen-der agreement was limited to singular definite articles, and it gradually extended to the rest of the categories. Interestingly, these findings are in line with SLA research on the acqui-sition of gender agreement in DP. In fact, Hawkins (1998) showed that English students speaking French as a second language presented more agreement on definite articles than on indefinite ones, and also more agree-ment on determiners than on adjectives; similar findings have also been reported for English speakers of Spanish by Bruhn de Garavito & White (2000), and more recently by Franceschina (2005) who tested advanced speakers of Spanish coming from a variety of backgrounds (Italian, Portu-guese, English, Arabic, German and French). All these studies on gender agreement also share the common view that masculine is the default value, as it appears significantly more on determiners, and on adjectives in cases of agreement mismatches. These data indicate that language evolution fol-lows certain hierarchical steps, as proposed by Pienemanns (1998) Pro-

DP



Figure 3. Gender agreement patterns for the 2150 generation according to grammatical category (percentages and raw numbers)



cessability Theory. According to Processability Theory, there is a universal, implicational hierarchy of processing procedures derived from the gen-eral architecture of the language processor. Additionally, there are specific procedural skills needed for the production of utterances from a language to be learned, the target language. Based on these assumptions, several predictions can be made for second language development which can be tested empirically. The central claim of this theory is that these process-ing procedures not only reflect their sequence of activation in language generation but also that the acquisition of these procedures will follow this implicational hierarchy. More research must definitely be carried out to achieve a broader generalization and decide on whether the path of gender-agreement development reported in (19) can really be considered as a list of activations in language generation; nevertheless, the data and the framework seem to be highly promising.

9. Conclusions

This study offers a quantitative approach to variable gender agreement within the DP in Afro-Bolivian Spanish. Our findings and proposal try to bridge the gap between the study of variation and general theories about syntactic structure. Variation is a component of human languages, and our results confirm that it should be taken into account when ana-lyzing structural properties in specific syntactic domains, such as agree-ment in the DP. Our goal is to characterize the ingredients of variation in a structurally systematic fashion, as computationally determined by differences in the specification of lexical items and by restrictions on syn-tactic operations, more specifically, as a locality condition on agreement. Accounts of this sort are now possible after recent developments in the minimalist (and related) frameworks, which are trying to account for alternation and variation phenomena affecting syntactic elements (Adger & Smith 2005). Our proposal also has important sociolinguistic consequences. The underlying reasons pushing Afro-Bolivian in the direction of a more pres-tigious Spanish variety are essentially the stigmatization of the Afro-His-panic vernacular and the increasing contact with a more prestigious Span-ish dialect. Contact with Bolivian Spanish increased substantially after


1952, the year of the Bolivian Land Reform, which freed Afro-Bolivians from slavery and introduced education in the black communities. These changes, which have affected the socio-economic scenario of black Bolivia during the last six decades, are reflected in the speech of the members of its community. This scenario would explain why generation was proven to be a significant factor group affecting the studied variation. Moreover, the different factor weights displayed within the factor group grammatical category suggest that different grammatical elements have different probabilities of agreeing with the gender feature of N. This fact, in addition to the constant ranking showed cross-generationally and to the 100 percent agreement for singular definite articles, might indicate that in a previous stage of development agreement was limited to these elements, and then it gradually spread to other categories. The nature of this transi-tion is shown to be gradual, thus containing much alternation between forms. From a theoretical perspective, this work sheds some light on the lin-guistic constraints regulating gender agreement in an Afro-Hispanic ver-nacular approximating to a more prestigious Spanish dialect. The process is driven by social factors through a path that is highly constrained by syn-tactic restrictions and configurations (cf. also Cornips & Corrigan 2005).

Abbreviations

ABS Afro-Bolivian SpanishD DeterminerDEF ART Definite articleDEM DemonstrativeDP Determiner PhraseF FeminineG Gender featureHBS Highland BolivianSpanishHPSG Head-driven Phrase Struc-

ture Grammari InterpretableINF InfinitiveM MasculineN Noun

NP Noun PhrasePST PastPL pluralPOST-NOM ADJ Post-nominal adjectivesPRE-NOM ADJ Pre-nominal adjectivesPRS PresentPST PastREFL ReflexiveSG SingularSLA Second langage acquisitionSTRONG Q Strong quantifieru UninterpretableVal ValueWEAK Q Weak quantifier


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Authors addressesSandro SessaregoDepartment of Spanish & Portuguese1018 Van Hise Hall1220 Linden DriveUniversity of Wisconsin at MadisonMadison, WI 537061557, USAE-mail: [email protected] Gutirrez RexachDepartment of Spanish and PortugueseHagerty Hall 298The Ohio State UniversityColumbus, OH 43210, USAE-mail: [email protected]

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a minimalist approach to gender agreement in the afro-bolivian dp

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afrobolivian spanish

gender agreement

genderagreement variation

determiner phrase dp

afrohispanic vernacular

prestigious spanish

land reform

los yungas