UC Berkeley

This dissertation provides a grammatical description and sociohistorical account of the Cavite variety of Philippine Creole Spanish (PCS), also known as Cavite Chabacano (CC); and analyzes how this language informs standard typological characterizations of contact languages. CC is one of three surviving varieties of Chabacano, a Spanish-lexified contact language of the Philippines. The unique status of Chabacano as the only Spanish-lexified creole in Asia presents a number of typological challenges to standard views of colonial contact languages based on prototypical plantation creoles. Most work on Chabacano assumes that it is a creole language, and only a few recent works on the Zamboanga variety of Chabacano have questioned this classification. The current work reexamines the status of Chabacano as a creole language by providing linguistic data from an understudied Chabacano variety and examining it from a typological perspective.

On the descriptive front, the dissertation provides a sketch grammar that constitutes the most complete description of the language to this date. The linguistic description is supplemented with a sociohistorical reconstruction that proposes different stages in the development of CC: an initial period of koineization, a period of hispanization or ‘decreolization’, and a latter period in which more Tagalog forms were incorporated from the adstrate. Comparative linguistic evidence from CC and two other Chabacano varieties supports this account.

The latter part of the dissertation evaluates the CC using typological accounts of contact languages. It is argued that the language poses two main challenges to previous models of language contact outcomes; first, it shows continuity between the lexifier and the creole, and second, it shows that the language's classification into a category such as koiné or creole may shift during the development of the language. A model of radial categories (Lakoff 1987) is suggested as an alternative to more restrictive categorizations of language contact outcome