Zamboanga Chavacano Verbal Aspects: Superstrate and Substrate Influences in Morphosyntactic Behavior

Zamboanga Chavacano Verbal Aspects: Superstrate and Substrate Influences on Morphosyntactic Behavior Abee M. Eijansantos Jeric B. Ventoza Zamboanga State / Fort Pilar, Ateneo de / Tumaga, College of Marine / Zamboanga Zamboanga / Zamboanga City, Sciences & Technology / City, Philippines University / Philippines ameijansantos@zscmst.edu.ph ventozajerb@adzu.edu.ph Rochelle Irene G. Lucas Ericson O. Alieto De La / Taft Ave. Western / Baliwasan, Salle / Manila, Mindanao / Zamboanga City, University / Philippines State University / Philippines rochelle.lucas@dlsu.edu.ph ericsonalieto@gmail.com Abstract It was hypothesized that Zamboanga Chavacano verbs exhibit variation in the need for a verbalizer prior to verbs whose origin is not the superstrate Spanish. To address the hypothesis, 200 verbs from the 500,000-word Zamboanga Chavacano corpora were analyzed using AntConc 3.5.8 (Windows) 2019. Additionally, verbs from different origins were subjected to analysis. Taken from the Composite Dictionary of Riego de Dios (1989), 100 verbs which were Spanish originated and another 100 that were non-Spanish were subjected to elicitation among 104 native speakers of Zamboanga Chavacano. The data revealed that the same case was observed for Zamboanga Chavacano as the Cotabato variety, but the verbalizer had the tendency to cliticize with the perfective and imperfective aspects, while only deletion took place for the contemplative aspect. Additionally, verbs that are inflected required the verbalizer no regardless of their origins. Keywords: Zamboanga Chavacano, Spanish verbs, aspect marker, verbalizer 1. Introduction The Chavacano language is a Creole language (Lipski, 1987, 2012; Barrios, 2006; Wolff, 2006; Meyerhoff, 2008; Steinkrüger, 2008, 2013; Paz, Hernandez, & Peneyra, 2010; and Porras, 2013) that is Spanish-based (Holm, 2001). Creole formation occurs where both the superstrate and substrate languages contribute to the creole’s structure (Crowley, 1997; Holm, 1988). Further, creoles emanate from the source languages which influence their grammar, but the features are adopted in a rather “less complex rendition” (McWhorter, 2018, p.18). Premised on the preceding claims, Chavacano as a Creole is expected to exhibit traces from its source languages: Spanish (Lipski, 1986 as cited in Barrios, 2006), as its superstrate language, and some Philippine-type languages such as Filipino and Cebuano (Barrios, 2006) as its substrate languages. As such, Chavacano is a Creole language that exudes syntactic influences from its source languages. One of these observations is that of Riego de Dios & Otanes (1989) of the Chavacano variant spoken in Cotabato (henceforth Ct) which is said to have been greatly influenced by the variety spoken in Zamboanga. They claimed that the Ct’s verbs behave varyingly which is dependent on the language source of the verb. Verbs whose source is a Philippine language or English, a verbalizing marker—man—is necessary to be prefixed to a verb stem prior to the prepositioning of the aspect marker—ya for past/punctual, ta for the present/durative aspect or ø/ay for future—while no prefixing is syntactically needed when the verb stem is Spanish-derived. Thereby, it was hypothesized that (1) Zamboanga Chavacano (hereafter ZCh) exhibits an identical syntactic behavior in the selection of the aspectual markers where a verbalizing marker is necessary for non-Spanish-derived verbs to permit the …

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