A Gbe substrate model for discontinuous negation in Spanish varieties of Chocó, Colombia: Linguistic and historical evidence

In this paper I highlight the central role of an oft-neglected source language model
in the presence of discontinuous negation, also known as NEG2 (e.g. yo no sé cuál
es no ‘I don’t know which one it is’), in the Spanish of Chocó, Colombia. Namely,
I point to the presence of analogous negation patterns in Ewe, a widely-spoken
variety of Gbe across modern-day Ghana, Togo, and Benin. Data from the
Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database as well as a 1759 census of the enslaved
African(-descendant) population in Chocó mining camps strongly suggest that Gbe
languages were spoken by one-third of enslaved Africans taken to the Pacific lowland
region of Colombia via the Caribbean port of Cartagena in the 17th and 18th
 centuries. Traditionally, non-canonical patterns of negation in Ibero-Romance contact
varieties involving discontinuous (i.e. pre-verbal and utterance-final) and strictly
utterance-final negator morphemes have been attributed to Bantu languages such
as Kikongo, some varieties of which feature similar structures. However, for the
years in which enslaved Africans were being trafficked directly from West Africa to
Chocó via Cartagena (1650–1800), archival sources indicate that those from
Bantu-speaking regions of West Central Africa comprised close to one-sixth of the total
African-born population, and thus just around half as many as the Gbe-speaking
group. Together these findings lead to the conclusion that speakers of Gbe
(especially Ewe) played a foundational role in the development of non-canonical
negation patterns in Spanish varieties spoken in Chocó, Colombia.