Biography:
Johan De La Rosa Yacomelo is a second year graduate student of Spanish Linguistics and Language Science at The Pennsylvania State University. He was born in Barranquilla, Colombia, and did his undergraduate and Master at Universidad del Atlántico, Colombia.
His main interests include: language contact, language and cognition, language acquisition, and bilingualism.
In the summer of 2017, he will be doing Field Research in San Basilio de Palenque, Colombia to study the variability in the use of overt and omitted subjects in speakers of Palenquero, in collaboration with his advisors Dr. John Lipski (The Pennsylvania State University) and Dr. Marianne Dieck (Universidad de Antioquia, Colombia).
Project Summary:
One of the main characteristics of Creole languages, including Palenquero, is the simplification of their verbal system by the use of un-inflexed verbs and the presence of overt subjects. However, in Palenquero, young heritage speakers are showing variability and uncertainty in the inclusion of overt and omitted subjects. The omission of subjects in production may affect comprehension due to the ambiguity of the information provided, which is not available in the verb form. This PIRE II investigation aims to discover the strategies that young speakers of this language resort to in order to compensate the absence of subjects. Besides that, this project also aims to determine whether their variation in production differs from their comprehension and whether this variation affects the same way all types of subjects (e.g. personal pronouns and nominal phrases) or there are clear tendencies that may be perceived.