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This paper investigates the occurrence and/or non-occurrence of Spanish origin function words and inflectional categories in Palenquero, a Spanish-lexicon based creole spoken near the Caribbean coast of Colombia, S.A., and Modern Mexicano (Nahuatl), a mixed language (traditionally classified as a member of the Uto-Aztecan family) spoken in the Malinche region of Central Mexico -- with special reference to the Spanish dialect spoken in that area). To the extent that function words such as adpositions, determiners, connectives, and so on play pivotal roles in the structural organization of a language (by expressing spatial, temporal, and logical relations among its various phrasal and clausal constituents, i.e., lexical items), it appears that both languages are basically held together by Castilian Spanish forms. In the case of Mexicano, these words have been borrowed gradually from a socially dominant and genetically unrelated variety, while in Palenquero, they were inherited from its superstrate (lexifier) with little or no overt competition from substrate forms. In general, neither has inherited, acquired, or developed a Castilian-like morphosyntactic matrix despite the fact that both are under significant pressure from Spanish as a result of contact (in the sense of Weinreich 1953).
While it may be a relatively simple task to propose morphological constraints to account for the lack of Spanish inflectional categories in both languages (Field 1997a), and to identify the social motivations accounting for the lack of core vocabulary items in Mexicano (Field 1997b), the presence of nearly equal numbers of certain Spanish function words in the creole and the mixed language may require some explanation. It is proposed that the investigation of pertinent semantic and formal differences between function items and markers of inflectional categories in these two varieties may shed light on processes of creolization and general (normal) language change resulting from contact. On the one hand, function words typically express relational concepts common to all languages irrespective of the formal means available (cf., Clark 1993, pp. 43-49 and Heine et al 1991, pp. 42-43). On the other, inflectional morphology represents language particular inflectional categories (e.g., gender and number on nouns and tense, aspect, and person-number agreement on verbs) that are much more grammaticalized and, hence, semantically opaque. Accordingly, categories are analyzed along three distinct lines. The first is according to types of meaning--based on Bybee's (1985) study of the relative occurrences of inflectional categories associated with verbs across a broad range of the world's languages--represented by the following implicational scale (adapted from Croft 1990, p. 177):
valence > voice > aspect > tense > mood > person-number agreement
The second is according to the number of inflectional meanings (obligatorily) expressed by a single morpheme (e.g., those expressed in fusional-type affixes versus those that are agglutinative). Finally, we discuss the potential complicating effects of language specific interplays of categories (e.g., tense versus aspect) and the strictly grammatical (and redundant) information marked through obligatory agreement (e.g., gender-number concord within the Spanish NP). It will be argued that meaning and form type are relevant with respect to the acquisition and borrowability of function words and inflectional affixes (Field 1997c), and, as a consequence, to particular aspects of creolization, i.e., to the learnability of highly grammaticalized forms in untutored contexts (Pica 1983).
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