Home Linguistics & Semiotics Casting light on the Spanish creole debate
Chapter
Licensed
Unlicensed Requires Authentication

Casting light on the Spanish creole debate

A legal perspective
  • Sandro Sessarego
View more publications by John Benjamins Publishing Company
Search
Hispanic Linguistics
This chapter is in the book Hispanic Linguistics

Abstract

This paper provides a legal perspective on the “Spanish Creole debate”, the debate concerning the paucity of Spanish creoles in the Americas (Lipski 2005; McWhorter 2000). In so doing, it presents the Legal Hypothesis of Creole Genesis (LHCG) (Sessarego 2015, 2017a) and tests it on Colombian Chocó, a remote region, far away from urban centers and legal courts, where law could hardly be enforced during the colonial period.

Abstract

This paper provides a legal perspective on the “Spanish Creole debate”, the debate concerning the paucity of Spanish creoles in the Americas (Lipski 2005; McWhorter 2000). In so doing, it presents the Legal Hypothesis of Creole Genesis (LHCG) (Sessarego 2015, 2017a) and tests it on Colombian Chocó, a remote region, far away from urban centers and legal courts, where law could hardly be enforced during the colonial period.

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Introduction 1
  4. Part I. Language acquisition
  5. The development of intonation in L2 Spanish 11
  6. Insights into the cognition of mood selection in L2 learners of Spanish 33
  7. The licensing of wh-in-situ questions 53
  8. What derivational suffixes should we teach in Spanish as a Second Language courses? 75
  9. Part II. Theoretical and descriptive approaches
  10. The seem-class verb paradigm and restructuring in Romance 97
  11. The Progressive-to-Imperfective shift 119
  12. The aspectual structure of the adjective 137
  13. Mood in future-framed adverbials 161
  14. Syntactic and prosodic marking of subject focus in American English and Peninsular Spanish 183
  15. Part III. Language contact and variation
  16. Demystifying Salvadoran [s θ ] 207
  17. Afro-Peruvian Spanish declarative intonation 229
  18. Subject-predicate code-switching 249
  19. The differing behavior of loanwords in the Spanish of technology and of fashion and beauty 265
  20. Futurity and probability in Spanish as a heritage language 285
  21. Examining the (mini-) variable swarm in the Spanish of the Southeast 303
  22. Casting light on the Spanish creole debate 327
  23. Index 343
https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.26.16ses

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Introduction 1
  4. Part I. Language acquisition
  5. The development of intonation in L2 Spanish 11
  6. Insights into the cognition of mood selection in L2 learners of Spanish 33
  7. The licensing of wh-in-situ questions 53
  8. What derivational suffixes should we teach in Spanish as a Second Language courses? 75
  9. Part II. Theoretical and descriptive approaches
  10. The seem-class verb paradigm and restructuring in Romance 97
  11. The Progressive-to-Imperfective shift 119
  12. The aspectual structure of the adjective 137
  13. Mood in future-framed adverbials 161
  14. Syntactic and prosodic marking of subject focus in American English and Peninsular Spanish 183
  15. Part III. Language contact and variation
  16. Demystifying Salvadoran [s θ ] 207
  17. Afro-Peruvian Spanish declarative intonation 229
  18. Subject-predicate code-switching 249
  19. The differing behavior of loanwords in the Spanish of technology and of fashion and beauty 265
  20. Futurity and probability in Spanish as a heritage language 285
  21. Examining the (mini-) variable swarm in the Spanish of the Southeast 303
  22. Casting light on the Spanish creole debate 327
  23. Index 343
Sign up now to receive a 20% welcome discount
Institutional Access
How does access work?
Have an idea on how to improve our website?
Please write us.
© 2025 De Gruyter Brill
Downloaded on 17.9.2025 from https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1075/ihll.26.16ses/html
Scroll to top button