8 (It-)clefts in Palenquero Creole and the specificational copula

Palenquero Creole is a Caribbean Spanish-based creole spoken in San Basilio de Palenque (Colombia). It presents four overtly expressed copula forms: ta (lexically from Sp. estar) a locative copula; the forms é (or era) and sendá, which occur with both individual-level adjectival predicates and nominal predicates; and jue (lexically from Sp. < fue), which has the same functions as é and sendá, but works as a focus marker, too (section 2). This paper examines what distribution the copula forms of é/era; jué; sendá have within cleft-clauses. The authors approach this topic by analysing a corpus of primary data in addition to Friedemann and Patiño Rosselli (1983) and Maglia and Moñino's (2015) existing corpora (section 3). In particular, the authors show that the presence of the copula é or sendá can be attributed to sociolinguistic factors, namely the age of speakers. Lastly, the authors analyse peculiar (it-)cleft constructions in Palenquero. These allow a null subject in the main clause, exhibiting a high proximity to its pro-drop lexifier language (Spanish), while selecting the copula jue in the cleft clause (section 5). The last section of the paper (section 6) will highlight the writers' conclusions.