Intercultural Pragmatics· 2026Q1
Variables in contact: nominal address terms in Palenquero and Palenquero Spanish
- 0citations
- Q1SCImago
- 2026year
Short summary
Nominal address term selection in Palenquero and Palenquero Spanish is primarily driven by power and social distance, with Palenquero maintaining a broader repertoire while Palenquero Spanish uses a narrower inventory aligned with hierarchy.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Key points
- Address term selection in Palenquero and Palenquero Spanish is mainly determined by power and social distance.
- Gender, age, and education have minimal systematic influence on address term choice.
- Palenquero uses a broad, flexible repertoire of address terms, retaining kinship and solidarity forms.
- Palenquero Spanish utilizes a narrower inventory of address terms, more strictly reflecting hierarchy.
- Palenquero Spanish may function as a 'pragmatifier,' influencing the salience of sociopragmatic variables.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
Abstract This study examines nominal address in Palenquero and Palenquero Spanish, two languages spoken in the historically Afro-Colombian creole community of San Basilio de Palenque, Colombia. Drawing on survey data from 62 bilingual speakers within a Variational Pragmatics framework, we model address-term choice with Bayesian multinomial mixed-effects regression, accounting for the multiple responses each speaker contributed. In both systems, address selection is conditioned chiefly by power and, secondarily, by social distance, while gender, age, and education play little systematic role. The two languages nonetheless encode these pressures differently: Palenquero keeps a broad, flexible repertoire in which kinship and solidarity forms remain available even in asymmetrical encounters, whereas Palenquero Spanish uses a narrower inventory more tightly aligned with hierarchy. We tentatively propose that Spanish functions here as a pragmatifier, shaping the salience of sociopragmatic variables without supplying the forms through which they are realized.
The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Intercultural Pragmatics, 2026 · DOI ↗
The rest is in the Pofolia app
Takeaways and questions to the paper; new summaries every day for your field. Free.
Sign in on the web to openField: Linguistics and Language
Linguistics and LanguageSocial Sciences