Hispanisation: The Impact of Spanish on the Lexicon and Grammar of the Indigenous Languages of Austronesia and the Americas

represent respectively the weak and optionally voiced consonants, and the unvoiced and optionally long consonants) and an optional (but common) deletion of the vocalic endings of the words are relevant, along with an optional deletion of the last syllable of the grammatical words, like postpositions. Displaying these elements of word reduction and with lexical complexities, the language shows great variability, including ritual and cryptic uses (see Sherzer 1975), and beyond more obvious differences, linked to the age of the speaker, and between men and women (see Pacini 2001, 2002).

2. Phonetic and syntactic interferences A possible influence of Spanish on Kuna can be seen in two cases of phonetic variation, in the sense that two phonological rules of the regional Spanish apply also to Kuna. This coincidence can, of course, be casual. The first variable rule is the strengthening, by affrication, of postnasal /s/, as we can see in binsae ‘think’, whose pronunciation can be both [pin'sae] and [bin'sae] or [pin'tsae] ~ [bin'tsae].4 The word is likely a Spanish loanword (cf. pensar ‘think’) and we have to add that the /ns/ cluster is very rare in Kuna, avoided at the morpheme border (gunn(e) + -sa (eat + PAST)  ['guta]), but possible in external samdhi (mimmigan sate ‘without children’). On the other hand, a clearly native sound, initial [j], can be strengthened optionally like in the (widely) regional Spanish. For example, the words yer ‘very’, yaug ‘tortoise’, yala ‘side, country’ can be pronounced [jer, 'jauk, 'jala] as well as [er, 'auk, 'ala]. This (possible) Spanish pronunciation

80 Luciano Giannelli and Raoul Zamponi can be easily accepted as it is integrated in a general process of strengthening of the initial consonants, that traditionally applies to obstruents and, in particular, to stops (['kuna] or ['guna], while ['nega] ‘house, space, land’ is practically the only permissible form). In any case, the acceptance of the Spanish variation is selective. We do not know of any example of a Kuna word beginning with /j/ pronounced as [d], which is common in Spanish pronunciation in Latin America, even if it is not very frequent in Panama or perhaps less frequent than in other countries. These facts lead us to reject the possibility that the strengthened pronunciation of initial /j/ is due to Spanish pressure. But, in general, we cannot forget that every variation and every change of today’s Kuna occurs within the context of Kuna’s relationship to Spanish through a (strong) minority of bilingual speakers, even if these changes are mediated to a great extent by the islanders, or at least those not urbanized. So, if we cannot perceive exactly the motivations and the “meaning” of the quick loss of some variable pronunciations which correspond to the loss of sounds that are unknown in Spanish, we have to at least consider the pressure of Spanish. This is the case of [  :] respectively for /s e r/, in words like wisi ‘to know’, usu ‘rabbit’, degi ‘so’ or bane ‘tomorrow’ (where /e/ is respectively stressed and unstressed), ari ‘iguana’, and so on. In the case of the palatalized realization of /s/, we believe that [] had been the most common realization, which easily justifies [t] as the strong counterpart of /s/ (see wis suli [wit:uli] ‘I do not know’). The loss of [  :] from Kuna eliminates the sounds that are not present in Spanish, so that the only difference in sounds between Kuna and Spanish remains the indifference of Kuna regarding voicing, the source of many orthographical errors in Spanish (consider the written words amico for amigo ‘friend’, castar for gastar ‘expend’, and so on), and the (possible) long pronunciation of strong consonants. In other words, Kuna speakers, and we can say, the bilingual Kuna speakers, introduced and are developing a normalization of Kuna pronunciation with respect to the Spanish one, in a process of convergence. This can be very important in consonantal clusters and their constraints. The Kuna language does not present initial consonant clusters, apart from the vexata quaestio of the possible presence of the (also initial) cluster /kw/ or, alternatively, of a pair of labiovelar phonemes, weak and strong (see Giannelli 2002). Our opinion is that Kuna has lost this phoneme, so that it represents the “exceptional” situation of the presence of a lone initial cluster gw- (realized as [gw]- ~ [kw]-) in words like gwenad ‘relative, kin’, gwakwa ‘parrot’, and gwensak(a) ‘one’). On the other hand, Kuna does have the phoneme /w/ (see the minimal pairs wala ‘large place; trunk’ contrasting

Hispanisms in Kuna 81

with yala ‘land, zone, mountain’, and ua ‘fish’ vs. wa ‘smoke’) just as Spanish does (cf. huevo ‘egg’ and hueso ‘bone’). As happens in many languages, the CV structure of the first syllable of the word can be enriched internally in the present-day Kuna, while heavy syllables at the end of the word are widely present. In spite of this, there are Kuna scholars who are working to demonstrate that the syllabic structure of Kuna, and its word structure, was, or – more relevantly – is subjacently CVCV(CV). As regards the current conditions, this is possible because of the “living etymology” current in Kuna (see Wagua and Green 2004), thanks to the current use of long and short forms of the same word, for simple terms, but also complex and “hard” terms, as: (i) The Kuna language has reduced forms of words and a good number of the reduced forms have a complete form well known by every speaker, e.g. nega ~ neg ‘house’. (ii) In many cases, the reduced forms – and the derived compounds – have a complete counterpart which is known only by a few speakers, e.g. ablis ‘blood’ from abe ‘blood’ + nisa ‘liquid, juice’. (iii) Of some reduced forms, only a handful of people (generally the saila, political and spiritual leaders) know the full version – see argana ‘hand’, commonly argan, and ogoba ‘coconut’, commonly ogob – while some forms can only be reconstructed with difficulty. One of these is neggwebur, interpreted as a word that was originally the sentence nega gue bula ‘the houses stay together’, with the typically polysemic word bula used as an adverb (‘all within’) and also as a noun (‘gathering’) to produce the meaning of ‘weed’ (maleza in Spanish). From this, we can observe in the Kuna culture a continuous and tremendous interest in discovering etymologies, not in any way blocked by real difficulties in providing them or by weak evidence. In any case, we can say that clusters Cr are not original and are (were) to be avoided, as we can see in loanwords like nibir ‘pound, scales’ (from Spanish libra ‘pound’), badir ‘priest’ (from Spanish padre), bate ‘dish’ (from English plate), or reduced compounds like ablis ‘blood’ from abe-nisa, and the problematic bergwable ‘all’. The idea that Cr clusters are not indigenous can be accepted, while this seems impossible for rC clusters, which are present in too many common roots like garba ‘basket’, burba ‘soul’ and birga ‘year’. rC clusters are also found in lexemes like urba ‘younger brother’ and ‘under’, very probably ulu (~ ur) + ba(li) ‘under the canoe’, as well as loanwords like garda ‘paper, letter, book’ from Spanish carta ‘paper’, and garbinder ‘carpenter’ from

82 Luciano Giannelli and Raoul Zamponi English. Cr clusters remain rare in Kuna, but current Kuna presents, in its roots and in many bimorphemic words, the same constraints on consonant clusters that occur in Spanish, if we also consider the avoiding of some clusters as in anmar ‘we’ pronounced as ['am:ar], abnisa reduced to [a'blisa], gun-le ‘be eaten’ with a taxative pronunciation ['gul:e], agsu ‘brother-in-law of a woman’ commonly pronounced ['ajsu]. (Different realizations have to be considered residual.) In other words, the allowed syllabic structure with consonant clusters are both CVr
CV and CV
CrV (with the important exception of some clusters at some morphological border, like dadgan and babgan, that is dada + -gana (grandfather + COLL5) ‘grandfathers’, and baba + -gana (father + COLL) ‘fathers’, whose respective pronunciations are ['datkan] ~ ['tatkan] and ['babgan] ~ ['pabgan]), or gobsa ‘I wept’ (gob(e) ‘weep’ + -sa ‘past’). We can add that a reconstruction of the original conditions shows that heavy syllables existed only if it were possible for the syllable to have a coda, while a heavy onset was impossible. Today these conditions have changed, and the elimination of [gw] as a phoneme can be seen as obeying this shift. This “silent pervasion” or – in the other direction – this “underground” hauling process and drift, through the convergence, can be found – or seen – also in idioms and pragmatic uses as well as in syntax. We find it difficult, for example, not to consider bane malo ‘good bye, see you tomorrow’ as a reproduction of the Spanish hasta mañana; another example is nued(i) ‘good’, that, with the meaning ‘all right’, is too similar to Spanish ¡bueno! to not consider it as a calque. The use of the future tense as a condescending or educated form of imperative (so that one can say dago(e), literally ‘you will come’ instead of dage to say ‘come!’) descends from Spanish, in the opinion of many (educated) speakers. In syntax, we find (in an educational book, whose author is a linguistically aware native speaker) the sentence in (1) translated as mi sobrina está parada ‘my niece is standing’. (1)

an sia gue gwichi 1PRO niece be standing ‘My niece is standing’

We cannot forget that, in everyday language, this sentence is often uttered – and seems more “correct” – without gue: an sia gwichi, as gwichi means ‘standing’. Nor can the language be defined as a copular one, in spite of some possible and sometimes necessary copular uses of gue. The an sia gue gwichi version seems a perfect calque of the organization of the Spanish sentence, as a heavy marker of the Spanish linguistic hegemony also on bilingual speakers engaged in the defence and development of the native language.

Hispanisms in Kuna 83

The last case we discuss is highly problematic, as the interpretation of the situation is unclear in basic present-day Kuna. (2)

segar an nika / sate match 1PRO have / have.not ‘I have/have not got matches’

In this example, the element indicating possession (nika), or its contrary (sate), is posed after the pronoun an ‘I’ just like a postpositional element. In spite of this all, we are not sure whether or not nika and sate are verbs. In common use, segar an nika/sate can alternate freely with an segar nika/sate, that seems to reproduce a simple SOV structure, without any particular significance. Of course, one of the two constructions depend on an extraposition or a raising process (very frequent in Kuna in a stylistic-pragmatic function), but here, understanding which is the basic form and the derived one is not easy. An auxiliary in the past is required, as in mani an nik gu-sa (money 1PRO have be-PAST) ‘I had money’, and these past forms seem to indicate only a non-verbal nature of nika and sate. Discussing the whole, very complex matter is, of course, impossible here (see Arias Díaz, Giannelli, and Zamponi forthcoming), and in any case we can say that a class of elements (that we can define as verbs) occur in past tense clauses in a similar way, instead of by the simple addition of the suffix -sa, as in an obe + -sa  an obsa ‘I washed myself’. What we can say is that the use of the probably most recent form, an mani nik gu-sa and of an mani nika ‘I have money’ is present in a scenario where the other language, Spanish, uses a transitive construction (tengo dinero ‘I have money’) for the possessive sentence.

3. Lexical borrowing At the lexical level, we may observe in Kuna a significant (but not particularly pervasive) presence of elements borrowed from Spanish within the classes of nouns, numerals, and verbs. As we may expect, the majority of these elements are cultural borrowings, i.e. terms for items or concepts originally alien to Kuna culture that came into the language along with their denotata. Among the apparently few “unnecessary” borrowings, i.e. loanwords for already known items or concepts, we may recall benao ‘deer’, gwebu ‘egg’, gwendo ‘story, tale’, and neche ‘milk’ (Sp. Venado, huevo, cuento, leche) – which are in competition, respectively, with the properly indigenous equivalents goe, allakwa, soged (from soge ‘say, tell’), and nunis (nu ‘breast’ + nis(a) ‘juice’). Olo ‘gold’ (Sp. Oro) has now completely

84 Luciano Giannelli and Raoul Zamponi replaced the traditional term gungi (Holmer 1952: 60), in all probability also a loanword (cf. Imperial/Cuzco Quechua qulqi ‘silver’6). While many loanwords have been adapted to Kuna phonology, others have not and retain their foreign shapes, albeit with minor segmental and suprasegmental modifications. The adaptation of Spanish loans fundamentally consists of (a) the replacement of the sounds foreign to Kuna (see Table 1) with the closest available sounds (in terms of features and acoustic properties), the vast majority according to the series of correspondences that appears in Table 2, and (b) the replacement of consonant clusters not permitted by the phonotactic rules of Kuna with permitted sequences or simple consonants (see Table 3). Table 1. Kuna and Spanish phoneme inventories In Spanish and Kuna Vowels

Only in Spanish

Only in Kuna

p, t, k

b, d, g

p:, t:, k:

s

f, , x

s: ([tS])

i, e, a, o, u

Stops Fricatives Affricates

t

Nasals

m, n

Trills

r

r:

Laterals

l



Glides

m:, n: l:

j, w

Table 2. Adaptation of foreign phonemes from Spanish loanwords Spanish

Kuna

Examples

b

p ()

abena ‘oats’, bunidu ‘bonito’ basu ‘drinking glass’, obisbo ‘bishop’ (Sp. Avena, bonito, vaso, obispo)

[d]

t ()

[]

t (), r, Ø

Dios ‘God’, dotor ‘doctor’, dordo ‘curtain, net’, dosin ‘dozen’ (Sp. Dios, doctor, toldo, docena) udio ‘Jew’, argar ‘mayor’, benao ‘deer’ (Sp. Judío, alcade, venado)

d

g

k ()

sigali ‘cigar(ette)’, ganso ‘hook’, iglesia ‘church’, gobierno ‘government’ (Sp. Sigarillo, gancho, iglesia, gobierno)



s

serbesa ‘beer’, mansan ‘apple’, oros ‘rice’, sabad ‘shoe’ (Sp. Cerveza, manzana, arroz, zapato)

Hispanisms in Kuna 85 Spanish

Kuna

Examples

x



wes ‘judge’, efe ‘boss’, eneral ‘general’, unio ‘June’ (Sp. Juez, jefe, general, junio)

r:

r

radio ‘radio’, rei ‘king’, bari ‘barrel’, oron ‘rum’ (Sp. Radio, rey, barril, ron)a

y, l, b

esdambiya ‘stamp’, yabi ‘key’, badila ‘watermelon’, basdia ‘sweet, pastille, tablet’, mardo ‘hammer’, sigali ‘cigar(ette)’, bote ‘bottle’ (Sp. Estampilla, llave, patilla, pastilla ‘pastille, tablet’, martillo, sigarillo ‘cigarette’, botella)c



a

b

c

Since the language does not admit /r/ in word-initial position in its indigenous vocabulary, Spanish words with an initial /r/ are realized in Kuna, in some cases, with a prothetic vowel that harmonizes with the following vowel (cf. also the personal names Araur, Aramon, and Oroberdo; Sp. Raúl, Ramón, and Roberto).  if // occurs in final open syllable. The vowel that precedes or follows // may also be deleted. Note the Spanish Americanism patilla ‘watermelon’.

Table 3. Adaptation of some aberrant consonant clusters from Spanish loanwords Spanish

Kuna

Example(s)

kt

t: ()

dotor ‘doctor’(Sp. Doctor)

mp

p ()

gaban ‘bell’ (Sp. Campana)

nx

s

naras ‘orange’ (Sp. Naranja)

ngl

l

iles ‘Englishman’ (Sp. Inglés)

lC

rC

dordo ‘curtain, net’, garson ‘trousers’, grub ‘club’, sorda ‘soldier, companion, partner’ (Sp. Toldo, calzón, club, soldado ‘soldier’)

Cr

CVra

dorombo ‘top (toy)’, nibir ‘pound, scales’, badir ‘priest’ (Sp. Trompo, libra ‘pound’, padre)

a

The V tends to harmonize with either the preceding or following V.

The replacement of sounds sometimes concerns vowels and consonants that Spanish and Kuna share. Spanish words with /e/ can sometimes appear with /i/; see dosin ‘dozen’ from docena, yabi ‘key’ from llave, simendo ‘cement’ from cemento, and badir ‘priest’ from padre. A loanword with /o/, especially in word-final position, can surface with a final /u/; see bunidu ‘bonito’ from bonito, badu ‘duck’ from pato, basu ‘drinking glass’ from vaso, gesu ‘cheese’ from queso, and gwebu ‘egg’ from huevo. A loanword with the affricate [t], which is the only manifestation of /s:/ in Kuna, as indicated

86 Luciano Giannelli and Raoul Zamponi above, can be realized with a short /s/; see musila ‘knapsack’ from mochila and also – not unexpectedly since /s:/, as well as all long consonants, is only intervocalic in Kuna – sino ‘Chinese man’ from chino and sogolade ‘chocolate’ from chocolate. Finally, some Spanish loanwords with /r/ and /l/ have realizations in Kuna with /l/ and /n/, respectively; see olo ‘gold’ from oro, bandela ‘flag, banner’ from bandera, nibir ‘pound, scales’ from libra ‘pound’, neche ‘milk’ from leche. As a rule, however, Spanish loans with (sequences of) segments that have Kuna equivalents, exhibit no significant phonetic adjustments; see arbon ‘harpoon’, biba ‘pipe’, de ‘tea’, dinda ‘ink’, mayo ‘May’, and semana ‘week’ for example (Sp. Arpón, pipa, té, tinta, mayo, semana). Words borrowed from Spanish that contain /f/, in actual occurrences, maintain this consonant, even though foreign to Kuna, e.g.: febrero ‘February’, fiesta ‘holiday, festivity, feast’, fudbol ‘football’ (Sp. Febrero, fiesta, fútbol), and Fransia dule, which has now replaced the more assimilated barses ‘French man’ (Sp. Francés), as originally recorded by Puig (1944), with /f/ converted into /p/ (cf. also gabi ‘coffee’ from English coffee). At the semantic level, Spanish loanwords can be divided into those that have (largely) maintained their original meaning and those that have not. The latter, typically, have an extended meaning being used, for example, to refer to the particular object designated by the word in the source language and also the whole class of which the original referent is a part or member (e.g. sigali ‘cigarette, cigar’ from sigarillo ‘cigarette’, sisa ‘alcoholic beverage’ from chicha ‘maize liquor’), and/or what the object is made of (e.g. garda ‘letter, book, paper’ from carta ‘letter’ and isbe ‘mirror, glass, crystal’ from espejo ‘mirror’). Two interesting cases of semantic widening can be observed in nibir ‘pound’ also meaning ‘scales’, from Spanish libra ‘pound’, and sorda ‘soldier’ also meaning ‘companion, comrade, partner, consort’, from Spanish soldado ‘soldier’. The class of nouns is that which, more than the other word classes, accepted lexical elements of Spanish. The borrowed nouns belong to specific semantic fields, the most significant of which seem to concern (A) objects, (B) materials, (C) foods and drinks, (D) flora, (E) fauna, (F) institutions, (G) Christianity, (H) professions/jobs, and (I) time. A short list of these is given in Table 4.

Hispanisms in Kuna 87 Table 4. Some Spanish loanwords in Kuna Meaning

Spanish

Kuna

Meaning

campana gaban

‘bell’

pato

badu

‘duck’

llave

yabi

‘key’

venado

benao

‘deer’

motor

modor

‘motor’

zapato

sabad

‘shoe’

Spanish A

B

espejo

D

E

b c d e

f

‘glass’

garda

‘paper’

oro

olo

‘gold’

b

G

blasdigo ‘plastic’

gobierno gobierno ‘government’ ley

lei

‘law’

policía

bolisia

‘police’

rey

rei

‘king’

ángel

anger

‘angel’ f

cruz

nagrus

‘(holy) cross’

chocolate sogolade ‘chocolate’

hostia

osdia

‘host’

pastilla

basdia

‘sweet (n.)’

misa

misa

‘mass’

té

de

‘tea’

doctor

dotor

‘doctor’

H

vino

bino

‘wine’

enfermero enfermero ‘nurse’

arroz

orosc

‘rice’

juez

wes

‘judge’

mango

mango

‘mango’

maestro

maesdro

‘schoolteacher’

martes

mardes

‘Tuesday’

mayo

mayo

‘May’

manzana mansan

‘apple’

naranja

‘orange’

gallina micho

a

isbe

F

a

carta plastica C

Kuna

naras gannir mis(i)

‘hen’ (met.) ‘cat’

e

I d

miércoles miergoles ‘Wesnesday’ semana

semana

‘week’

isbe ‘glass, crystal, mirror’. carta ‘letter’; garda ‘paper, letter, book’ aro in the Río Caimán dialect. galina in the Río Caimán dialect. The Spanish word micho (or michino), in all probability, reached Kuna via one or more indigenous South American languages (among these, apparently, Imperial/Cuzco Quechua, where michi means ‘cat’). A form mitSi or misi for ‘cat’ is also widespread in numerous native languages of the western sector of South America. The initial syllable na of this name, in all probability, is the Spanish (feminine singular) article la ‘the’ or una ‘a’.

The class of objects is the sector of Kuna nominal lexicon most enriched by borrowings, and not solely from Spanish. It is precisely this lexical category that shows the majority of English loanwords which can be found in Kuna, whose number is however rather limited; see, for example, bensil ‘pencil’ and Grismas ‘Christmas’, coexisting with the Hispanisms labis and Nabidad

88 Luciano Giannelli and Raoul Zamponi (Sp. lápiz, Navidad), sugar ‘sugar’ which forced itself onto the Hispanism achugwa (Sp. azúcar; Prince 1913: 489), siman or simen ‘cement’ on which the Hispanism simendo (Sp. cemento) forced itself, gidar ‘guitar’, mani ‘money’ (and also ‘silver’), nusbebar ‘newspaper’, wachi ‘watch’ (and also ‘hour’ and ‘time’), and mergi ‘American person’.7 Some Spanish loanwords denoting units of measurement are commonly used as nouns, which are also “classifiers for themselves”, lexicalizing, in an NP with a numeral (or with the interrogative quantifier bigwa ‘how many’), both the numeral classifier and the head noun (see Simpson 2005: 831), analogous to the native Kuna nouns with similar denotata (see Arias Díaz, Giannelli, and Zamponi forthcoming: sec. 5). This is an important testimony for the complete lexical assimilation of the loanwords in question. (3)

san nibir bo meat pound/CL two ‘two pounds of meat’

(4)

mor yarda bo cloth yard/CL two ‘two yards of cloth’

(5)

gwebo dosin bo egg dozen/CL two ‘two dozens of eggs’

(6)

mani bo five.cents/CL two ‘ten cents (of balboa/dollar)’

Taking into consideration that Spanish numerals are those which are used today by the Kuna in order to count, as indicated above, we may signal the presence in the present-day (rarely used) Kuna numeral system of the Hispanisms sero ‘zero’(Sp. cero), siendo ‘hundred’ (Sp. ciento), mili (~ mir) ‘thousand’ (Sp. mil), and miyon ‘million’ (Sp. millón). The use of siendo and mili imposes, we have to say, a violence on the Kuna numeral system, which is fundamentally vigesimal and, from 400 onwards, uses a base of 400 (dula classified by the numeral classifier wala- ~ war- ‘(ob)long’), acting as a basis for, respectively, the hundreds and the thousands (see Table 5).

Hispanisms in Kuna 89 Table 5. A few traditional and non-traditional numerals compared

100

400

1000

2000

Traditional numeral

Non-traditional numeral

dul-atar twenty-five [20  5] dula war-gwen twenty CL:OBL-one [400  1] dula war-bo gaka dul-ambe four.hundred CL:OBL-two CONN twenty-ten [(400  2) + (20  10)] dula wal-atar four.hundred CL:OBL-five [400  5]

siendo gwen hundred one [100  1] siendo bake hundred four [100  4] mili gwen thousand one [1000  1] mili bo thousand two [1000  2]

The Hispanisms in the domain of verbs are extremely rare, in particular, in the speech of old people. The existing “loanverbs” are uninflected forms accompanied by the indigenous Kuna verb sa(e) ‘do, make’, which follows the original Spanish verb (in the infinitive) and is inflected for tense-aspectmood: an basear sae ‘I go for a walk’ (Sp. pasear), an grabar saoe ‘I will record’ (Sp. grabar), an delefonar sasa ‘I telephoned’ (Sp. telefonear).8 A strong resistance opposes Spanish lexical borrowing in Kuna. This has meant that relatively few new (European) words were totally accepted, including terms common in many other native American languages as a consequence of the penetration of objects and Western cultural models in the respective societies. A notably heightened productiveness of the Kuna lexicon in supplying labels to new meanings, which manifests itself in a great capacity for neologisms (see Table 6) and also in a more moderate capacity of assuming indigenous terms into new meanings (see Table 7), inevitably relates to this resistance of Kuna to borrowings. Table 6. Neologisms for non-indigenous things Meaning(s)

Neologism

Literal meaning

‘film’ ‘steamer’ ‘lemon’ ‘potato’ ‘photo’ ‘patrol, kerosene, Diesel’

garda binnied so ur naras sole mergi gwalu wagar wilup gwallu di

‘paper which changes’ ‘fire ship’ ‘sour orange’ ‘American sweet potato’ ‘face print’ ‘oil/fat water’

90 Luciano Giannelli and Raoul Zamponi Table 7. Indigenous words for non-indigenous things Word

Traditional meaning(s)

Present-day additional meaning(s)

duba gala gingi gwallu

‘thread, rope, string’ ‘bone, pipe, whistle, flute, music’a ‘bow’ ‘fat, oil, lamp, light’

moli

‘tapir’

‘(electric) cable’ ‘radio, record player’ ‘firearm’ ‘(electric) lamp, bulb, chandelier, electric light’ ‘horse, donkey, bovine’

a

Pipes, whistle, and flutes were originally made of bone

Interestingly, the still flourishing Kuna language shows a strong resistance to the Spanish pressure at all its levels, we have to say, in spite of ever greater numbers of bilingual speakers. This does not mean that there is a total impermeability to the influx of the language that has, in this case, a hegemonic role. As in other situations, also those far from the Amerindian context, avoiding a manifest absorption of foreign elements does not preclude the hegemonic language from influencing the language at a deeper and less evident level.

Notes 1.

2.

3.

4.

Even though this article is a joint production by the two authors, in the present edition, sections 1 and 2 are to be attributed to Luciano Giannelli and section 3 to Raoul Zamponi. Within this family, Kuna does not seem to be closely related to any other particular language. A recent study on Chibchan comparative grammar (Quesada 1999) highlights that Chibchan languages spoken in Central America are differentiated from those of Colombia by a series of areal features. In light of this work, Kuna figures as a “Central American isthmian language of the Chibchan family in the Intermediate Area” (see also Quesada 2000: 8–10). Other works dedicated to Kuna phonology include Branca (1973b), Sherzer (1973, 1992, 1997), and Baptista and Wallin (1974), this last describing briefly the Panamanian continental varieties (Bayano valley). Kuna words are transcribed according to the principles of the official Kuna orthography (see Wagua and Green 2004). In this orthography, as indicated above, render /p t k/,

represent /p: t: k:/, denotes /s:/ (= [t]), is assigned to [j], while the other graphemes have their traditional IPA value. (Two adjacent identical consonant graphemes indicate a long consonant.)

Hispanisms in Kuna 91 5.

6.

7.

8.

1 = first person, C = consonant, CL = classifier, COLL = collective, CONN = (numeral) connective, F = feminine, met = metathesis, NEG = negative, NOM = nominalizer, OBL = (ob)long, PRO = pronoun, SG = singular, SOV = subjectobject-verb, Sp = Spanish, V = vowel. The Panamanian isthmus, since the first half of the 16th century, has acted as a crossing point for the precious metal route from Peru to Spain (Squillacciotti 1998: 19). Within the category of names for new objects certain Gallicisms (perhaps terms of Lesser Antillean Creole French) could have penetrated, one of which appears to be muswe ‘necktie, (hand)kerchief’ from mouchoir. Cf. the analogous treatment of verbs borrowed from Russian in Udmurt, a Finno-Ugric (Uralic) language of the region of the Urals (Winkler 2001: 56).

References Arias Díaz, Gervasio, Luciano Giannelli, and Raoul Zamponi forthc. Morfologia della lingua cuna (dule gaya). Munich: Lincom Europa. Baptista, Priscilla M. and Ruth Wallin 1974 La jerarquía fonológica del Bayano Cuna. In Lenguas de Panamá. Tomo I: Sistemas fonológico, Patricia Baptista (ed.), 7–16. Panama City: Instituto Nacional de Cultura and Instituto Lingüístico de Verano. Berengueras, José María 1934 Rudimentos de la gramática karibe-kuna. Panama City: Tipografía Católica. Boyd, Hedyx et al. 2003 Anmar gaya narmaked absoged durdakmala. Panama City: Ministerio de Educación. Branca, Gabriel B. 1973a An introduction to a linguistic description of the San Blas Cuna dialect. These presented to the Faculty of the English Dept. of the University of Panama. Panamá. 1973b Reglas morfonológicas para la asimilación de las consonantes en la lengua cuna. In Actas del IV Simposium Nacional de Arqueología, Antropología y Etnohistoria de Panamá. Panama City: Instituto Nacional de Cultura, 177–183. Erice, Jesús 1980 Gramática de la lengua kuna. Panama City: Impresora de La Nación. 1982 Diccionario de la lengua kuna. Panamá: Editorial Mariana Arosemena. Gassó, Leonardo 1908 Gramática karibe-kuna. Barcelona:Tipografia Católica.

92 Luciano Giannelli and Raoul Zamponi Giannelli, Luciano 1999 Abia Yala Inmargan – Americana: studi intorno alle lingue native di un antico/nuovo mondo. Siena: Protagon Editori Toscani. 2000 Breve profilo morfologico della lingua cuna (dule gaya); con un’ appendice di Réuter Orán Bodin. http://www.unisi.it/ricerca/centri/ cisai/index.htm, Linguistico, Lingua Cuna. 2002 Los problemas de la fonología cuna In Fonologia della lingua cuna (dule gaya), Luciano Giannelli, Giovanna Marotta, and Beatrice Pacini (eds.), 3–33. Munich: Lincom Europa. 2003 Per un sistema ortografico cuna (dule) oltre l’inventario alfabetico. In Scrittura in Centroamerica, Luciano Giannelli, and Maurizio Gnerre (eds.), 3–17. Siena: Università degli Studi di Siena, CISAI. Giannelli, Luciano, Giovanna Marotta, and Beatrice Pacini (eds.) 2002 Fonologia della lingua cuna (dule gaya). Munich: Lincom Europa. Holmer, Nils M. 1947 Critical and comparative grammar of the Cuna language. Göteborg: Etnografiska Museet. 1951 Cuna chrestomanthy. Gothenburg: Etnografiska Museet. 1952 Ethno-linguistic Cuna dictionary. Gothenburg: Etnografiska Museet. Ibelele 1981 Kuna-alfabeto. E burba oduloedigar. [Usdup/Ustupu]. Llerena Villalobos, Rito 1986 Lingüística amerindia: fonología de la lengua kuna. Lingüística y Literatura 10: 31–53. 1987 Relación y determinación en el predicado de la lengua kuna. Bogotá: Universidad de los Andes. Montalván, Ana 2001 [1973] Interpretación fonológica de las consonantes oclusivas geminadas en la lengua kuna, y la definición del alfabeto kuna. In Studi americani, Luciano Giannelli (ed.), 31–53. Siena: Università degli Studi di Siena, CISAI. Montalván, Ana and Doris Rojas 2000 Panamá y sus lenguas indígenas. Siena: Università degli Studi di Siena, CISAI. Orán Bodin, Réuter 1992 Ue an ai: libro de lectura para niños kunas. Primer grado. Panama City: ADS Publisher. 1994 Ue an ai: libro de lectura para niños kunas. Nba 2°. Panama City: ADS Publisher. Pacini, Beatrice 2001 La variabilità sociolinguistica in lingua cuna. Rivista Italiana di Dialettologia 25: 327–360

Hispanisms in Kuna 93 2002

Un primo approccio quantitativo alla fonologia cuna. In Fonologia della lingua cuna (dule gaya), Luciano Giannelli, Giovanna Marotta, and Beatrice Pacini (eds.), 49–80. Munich: Lincom Europa. Prince, J. Dyneley 1912 Prolegomena to the study of the San Blas language of Panamá. American Anthropologist 14, n.s.: 109–126. 1913 Grammar and glossary of the Tule language of Panamá. American Anthropologist 15, n.s.: 480–528. Puig, Manuel María 1944 Diccionario de la lengua caribe cuna. Panamá: La Estrella de Panamá. Quesada, J. Diego 1999 Chibchan: with social reference to participant-highlighting. Linguistic Typology 3: 59–108. 2000 A grammar of Teribe. Munich: Lincom Europa. Sherzer, Joel 1973 Interpretación sociolingüística de la fonología cuna. In Actas del IV Simposium Nacional de Arqueología, Antropología y Etnohistoria de Panamá, 187–195. Panama City: Instituto Nacional de Cultura. 1975 A problem in Cuna phonology. The Journal of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest 1: 45–53. 1978 Kuna numeral classifiers. In Linguistic and literary studies in honor of Archibal A. Hill, Mohammad Ali Jazayery, Edgar C. Polomé, and Werner Winter (eds.), 331–337. The Hague: Mouton. 1992 Formas del habla kuna. Quito: Abya Yala. 1997 Guide to Kuna pronunciation and grammar. In The art of being Kuna, Mari Lyn Salvador (ed.), 131–134. Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History. Simpson, Andrew 2005 Classifiers and DP structure in Southeast Asia. In The Oxford handbook of comparative syntax, Guglielmo Cinque and Richard Kayne, (eds.), 331–337. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, Lino et al. 1975 Informe de la reunión de la Subcomisión Técnica de la Comisión Especial del Ministerio de Educación sobre un alfabeto para la lengua cuna. Hombre y Cultura 3: 185–191. Squillacciotti, Massimo 1998 I Cuna di Panamá: identità di popolo tra storia e antropologia. Turin: L’Harmattan Italia. Wagua, Aiban 1984 Corso elementare di lingua cuna. Siena: Università di Siena. 2001 Corso elementare di lingua cuna =Curso elemental de lengua cuna. 2nd online edition, edited and commented by Luciano Giannelli. www.unisi.it/ricerca/centri/cisai/index.htm, Linguistico, Lingua Cuna.

94 Luciano Giannelli and Raoul Zamponi Wagua, Aiban and Abadio Green (eds.) 2004 Bases de lecto-escritura kuna: aspectos unificados bajo la dirección y decisión de los Congresos Generales Kuna, Onmaked Dummad Namaked – Onmaked Dummad Sunmakaled. Kuna Yala. Winkler, Eberhard 2001 Udmurt. Munich: Lincom Europa. Zamponi, Raoul 2000 Postilla. In Panamá y sus lenguas indígenas, Ana Montalván, and Doris Rojas (eds.), 83–94. Siena: Università degli Studi di Siena, CISAI.

Spanish lexical borrowing in Imbabura Quichua: In search of constraints on language contact Jorge Gómez Rendón

1.

Introduction

Imbabura Quichua1 (henceforth IQ) is one of several Ecuadorian dialects of the Quechua language family spoken in the Andean province of Imbabura. The permanent contact of IQ and local Spanish during the last 450 years has resulted in a significant influence from Spanish on the lexicon and the grammar of the native language. The present article deals with Spanish lexical borrowing in IQ. It explores the statistical results from the investigation of a corpus of spontaneous speech collected during fieldwork in Ecuador (2003–2004). The purpose is to identify possible linguistic constraints by analyzing statistical frequencies in the borrowing of major word classes. The present research is framed in the parts-of-speech theory developed by Hengeveld (1992) and Hengeveld et al. (2004). A more extensive analysis of lexical and grammatical borrowing in several Ecuadorian dialects from a cross-linguistic perspective is presented in Bakker et al. (2008). Section 2 makes the reader familiar with the sociolinguistic aspects of SpanishQuichua contact in Imbabura. Section 3 outlines the theory of parts of speech and develops individual hypotheses according to the typological classification of the languages involved in the borrowing process. Section 4 deals with the phonological and morphological changes to which Spanish lexemes are subject in the process of borrowing. Section 5 discusses the statistics concerning the borrowing of lexical classes in the light of Hengeveld’s theory and the implications for lexical borrowing. Section 6 offers some conclusions and suggestions for further research. 2.

Sociolinguistic aspects of language contact in Imbabura

2.1. Background Although the Northern Andes were subject to the rule of the Incas for only sixty years before the Spanish conquest, by the second half of the seventeenth-century Quechua had replaced the pre-Inca language of the Cara

96 Jorge Gómez Rendón people who inhabited the territory of the present province of Imbabura (Jijón y Caamaño 1941; Salomon and Grosboll 1986). Scholars have amply discussed the reasons for such a rapid expansion, identifying mainly two major factors. On the one hand, as it becomes evident from early historical records, Quechua was spoken in the (northern) Andes well before the Inca invasion, being introduced by long-distance traders from Chincha in central Peru (Torero 2003: 93–105). On the other hand, the use of Quechua as a lingua franca for the evangelization of native peoples during the first two centuries of Spanish colonization encouraged the language shift in non-Quechua speech communities. A more detailed history of Quechua in the Andes from the Spanish conquest to the present has been presented elsewhere (Bakker et al. 2008) and will not be addressed here. I turn now to describing the sociolinguistic profile of the communities where the data for this research were collected.

2.2. The communities of this study As far as the number of speakers is concerned, the province of Imbabura ranks second among the eleven Quichua-speaking provinces of Ecuador (Haboud 1998: 91–92). At the same time, Imbabura shows the largest number of bilingual Quichua-Spanish speakers in the country (Büttner 1993: 48–49). Imbabura Quichua speakers are deeply concerned with language maintenance and have been struggling for an egalitarian use of Quichua vis-à-vis Spanish in the last decades. The data for this research were collected in three Indian communities in Imbabura: Angla, Casco Valenzuela and El Topo. The communities are located on the skirts of the Imbabura Mountain in the Northern Andes of Ecuador, at scarcely forty minutes by bus from the cities of Otavalo and Ibarra and two times the same distance from the capital. The population of the three communities altogether amounts to some 1000 speakers. Historically, Angla was an Indian town separated from the surrounding estates, while the other two communities were located within Hacienda El Topo. Regardless of their adscription, the three communities delivered their workforce to the neighboring estates under different labor systems. Angla is the least traditional of the three communities as it maintains stronger links with the Mestizo society and shows higher levels of bilingualism. It is also known for speaking chapu-shimi, a mixed language of Spanish and Quichua2 that is being disseminated to neighboring communities through contact. On the contrary, Casco Valenzuela and El Topo have become ac-

Spanish lexical borrowing in Imbabura Quichua

97

tively involved in the Spanish-speaking society only in recent times. Casco Valenzuela and El Topo show higher levels of Quichua dominance over Spanish (Büttner 1993: 80–117)3, with gender and age playing an important role. There are more women (92.6%)4 than men (57.4%) who speak Quichua while the percentage of Quichua-speaking elders doubles that of youngsters. There appears to be a strong process of Hispanisation in the three communities as well as a steady increase of bilingualism across generations. The social and economic conditions underpinning this scenario are well known: on the one hand, the existence of impoverished Indian peasants living of subsistence agriculture on small, usually unproductive pieces of land, who are forced to hire their workforce in the big cities in order to supplement their family income5; on the other hand, the aggressive assault of the Spanish-speaking society on traditional Quichua communities through media and schooling6.

3.

Methodology

3.1. Data collection The data were collected during a four-month stay in the province of Imbabura, Ecuador. The author benefited from previous fieldwork in the communities, where he conducted research on a local mixed variety (Media Lengua). Although the data were collected in normal conversational settings, they were produced by different speakers and belong to different speech genres. Seven informants produced individual samples in seven recording sessions. All informants were in their late fifties or sixties at the time of recording and represented the most conservative speech in their communities. Only one woman (69) is represented in the samples. Three informants were born in Casco Valenzuela, two in Angla, and two in El Topo. For all the speakers, the birth community is the same as the community of residence7. In five cases the recording setting involved other people who were present but did not participate. The samples cover different topics ranging from family and community issues to more specific topics such as local festivals and life in the former haciendas and the parish town of San Pablo. Interethnic relations between Mestizos and Indians are a recurrent topic. The informants set their own narrative agenda and showed a strong involvement with their topics, as it is typical of testimonial narratives8.

98 Jorge Gómez Rendón 3.2. Data processing As for the processing of data, recordings were transcribed phonemically, with exclusive consideration of distinctive features. In the second step Spanish borrowings were identified between slashes, without including Quichua morphology. In marking the Spanish lexicon on Quichua texts, strains of Spanish speech that were considered code switches were not included9. The next step was to run a specially designed computer program on the parsed transcripts in order to produce statistical information with respect to the number of tokens and types for both languages (Quichua and Spanish) and the morphological context in which they appear (i.e. whether a Spanish borrowing occurs with other borrowings or with Quechua words). In the next stage, types and tokens10 were classified according to their parts of speech in Spanish and their syntactic position in Quichua. As no univocal correspondence between parts of speech and syntactic position exists across languages, a random sample of 1000 tokens including borrowed and autochthonous items were analyzed for their syntactic position in order to correlate the parts-of-speech distribution of borrowed items with the general distribution of parts of speech in the target language. A detailed visualization of the processing tasks is offered in Bakker et al. (2008).

3.3. The theory of parts of speech and the analysis of data The theoretical framework of this research is the theory of parts of speech as elaborated by Hengeveld (1992) and Hengeveld et al. (2004). Hengeveld’s theory is concerned only with content words, including nouns, verbs, adjectives and manner adverbs11. Hengeveld defines parts of speech primarily on syntactic grounds, with the phrase as the basic syntactic unit. Phrases can be referential (noun phrase) or predicational (verb phrase). Each phrase is composed of two slots, one for heads and one for modifiers. The four possible combinations for English are shown in Table 1. Table 1. Lexemes and syntactic slots

Referential Phrase Predicational Phrase

Head

Modifier

Noun Verb

Adjective (Manner) Adverb

Spanish lexical borrowing in Imbabura Quichua

99

In the frame of this theory, parts of speech are defined according to their non-predicative uses. Thus, “verbs are characterized by the fact that they have no non-predicative uses, i.e. they can be used predicatively only. Nonverbal lexemes, on the other hand, may have additional predicative uses, but their defining use is a non-predicative one” (Hengeveld et al. 2004: 6). A survey of typologically different languages spoken in several areas of the world showed that languages have specific distributions of lexical classes in what Hengeveld calls ‘parts-of-speech systems’ (cf. Table 2). While some languages have one lexical class for each syntactic slot (differentiated systems), others have more than one (flexible systems), and still others lack lexical items to fill syntactic slots (rigid systems). English is a typical example of a differentiated system in which nouns, verbs, adjectives and manner adverbs can be clearly identified in specific slots, as opposed to, for instance, Samoan in which virtually any lexeme can be used in any syntactic position. Table 2. Parts of speech systems Part of speech system Flexible

Head Pred. Phrase

Head Ref. Phrase

Modifier Modifier Ref. Phrase Pred. Phrase

1 2 3

Verb Verb

Lexeme Non-verb Modifier Noun

Differentiated

4

Verb

Noun

Adjective

Manner Adverb

Rigid

5 6 7

Verb Verb Verb

Noun Noun –

Adjective – –

– – –

There also exist languages that fit into two adjacent types and constitute intermediate systems. In the case of flexible languages, this situation occurs when derived lexemes cannot be used in all the syntactic slots in which their base lexemes are used. In the case of rigid languages, an intermediate system is attested when “the last class of lexemes on the hierarchy that is relevant for that language [is] a small closed class of items” (Hengeveld et al. 2004: 25). Including intermediate systems, the full inventory of language types amounts to thirteen. As it becomes evident from Table 2, parts-of-speech systems can be ordered from the least flexible system on one end (type 1) to the most rigid on

100 Jorge Gómez Rendón the other (type 7) through several less flexible or more rigid systems, including those with full differentiation. This pattern shows an implicational order in that, for instance, a language with a specific lexical class for predicate phrase modifiers always has individual lexical classes for each of the previous syntactic slots (system 4). Accordingly, no languages are attested which have a specific lexical class for predicate phrase modifiers but none for referential phrase modifiers, etc. The combination of syntactic positions and lexical classes reflects the cross-linguistic variation of languages around the world but also the developments in the history of individual languages whether they are product of internal or external changes such as contact with other languages. The result of synchronic and diachronic variation in parts of speech can be captured in an implicational hierarchy as shown below. Table 3. The parts-of-speech hierarchy Head of > Head of > Modifier of > Modifier of Predicate Referential Referential Predicate

Phrase

Phrase

Phrases

Phrase

As other implicational hierarchies proposed in the literature, the parts-ofspeech hierarchy not only implies a sequence but also specifies a direction (expressed by >). Directionality determines the scope of lexicalization and grammaticalization processes and is particularly relevant to explaining nonattested cases. For the sake of our study, directionality may be considered a constraint to flexibility. Directionality may explain why, for instance, IQ speakers do not use Spanish adverbs in adjective or noun positions although this may well be permitted by the existence of a non-specialized lexical class of non-verbs.

3.3.1. Implications of the parts-of-speech theory to lexical borrowing The point of departure for the present research is that parts-of-speech systems of the languages involved in the borrowing process are relevant to determining the type and the number of borrowed lexical classes. To be specific, the parts-of-speech system of the target language co-determines the borrowing of lexical classes from the source language and their functional adaptation in the target system. The implications of the theory of parts-ofspeech systems to lexical borrowing include several hypotheses and subhypotheses that may be read from two standpoints: the perspective of the

Spanish lexical borrowing in Imbabura Quichua

101

source language (hypothesis 1 below) with emphasis on the recognition of lexical classes and their frequency; and the perspective of the target language with emphasis on the use and function of borrowed lexemes (hypotheses 2–4 below). In what follows I develop all the possible hypotheses in detail, although in this study only two of them (H2 and H3) will be tested on an empirical basis. The remaining two hypotheses are irrelevant for the analysis pursued here either because a cross-linguistic comparison is required for meaningful results (H1), or because the target language of this study (IQ) is not a rigid but a flexible language (H4). The testing of the hypotheses across typologically different languages with flexible and rigid parts of speech has been carried out elsewhere (Bakker et al. 2008). H1.

Contiguous borrowing hypothesis: the typological distance between the source language and the target language is bridged in the order given by the parts-of-speech hierarchy. To be specific:

a. The more to the left a lexical class, the greater the number of lexemes borrowed. Therefore, heads are borrowed more often than modifiers, just like modifiers of referential phrases are borrowed more often than those of predicate phrases. b. Languages that borrow lexemes from one lexical class of the source language, more often than not borrow lexemes from the previous lexical classes. Thus, a language that borrows modifiers of referential phrases, usually borrows heads of referential and predicate phrases but not necessarily modifiers of predicate phrases, unless it is a flexible language filling this syntactic slot with a specialized lexical class (cf. 1c). c. Flexible and rigid languages may borrow lexemes from the lexical class immediately following the last lexical class attested in their own system. Type-2 languages would borrow nouns in larger numbers since nouns are the lexical class following the last class in their system (verbs). Hypothesis 1 establishes the general conditions for lexical borrowing on the basis of a typological parameter (the parts-of-speech hierarchy). In principle it does not exclude borrowings from lexical classes outside the parts-ofspeech system of the target language, provided they belong to contiguous classes. In other words, it constrains lexical borrowing in contiguity terms but allows for differential uses of borrowed lexemes inside and outside the parts-of-speech system of the target language.

102 Jorge Gómez Rendón However, as the parameters for comparison are not absolute but relative with respect to the target language, the predictions encompassed by hypothesis 1 can be assessed only cross-linguistically, that is, when at least two target languages are compared. Therefore, the results here will not deal specifically with this hypothesis. The hypotheses presented here concern only language pairs in which the source is always a differentiated language and the targets either flexible or rigid languages. Other hypotheses concerning different language pairs are possible though not considered here for reasons of space. H2.

Functional adaptation hypothesis: the syntactic distribution of borrowed lexemes in the target language follows the distribution of native lexical classes. For instance, a language that borrows adjectives may use them as modifiers of referential and predicate phrases provided it has a lexical class of modifiers that fulfill both syntactic functions. This prediction is relevant not only to languages with differentiated parts-of-speech systems but also to languages with flexible and rigid systems. In all cases, the typological configuration of the target language does not undergo changes.

Table 4. An example of functional adaptation Diff-4: Source

Verb

Noun

Flex-3: Target

Verb

Noun

Syntactic slot

Head of predicate phrase

Head of referential phrase

Flex-3: Target

Verb

Noun

H3.

Adjective

Adverb

Modifier Modifier of referntial phrase

Modifier of predicate phrase

Modifier

Functional specialization hypothesis: borrowed lexemes fill only the syntactic slots they originally occupied in the source language, i.e. the borrowed members of one lexical class specialize in their original syntactic slot. This means, for instance, that borrowed adjectives and adverbs will be used only in their respective positions of modifiers of referential and predicate phrases but not interchangeably as if they formed one lexical class. This hypothesis applies only to flexible languages, which become gradually differentiated in the process.

Spanish lexical borrowing in Imbabura Quichua

103

Table 5. An example of functional specialization Diff-4: Source

Verb

Flex-2: Target

Verb

Syntactic slot

Head predicate phrase

Noun

Adverb

No-Verb Head referential phrase

Flex-2: Target

H4.

Adjective

Modifier referential phrase

Modifier predicate phrase

No-verb

Lexicalization hypothesis: borrowed lexemes fill empty slots in the parts-of-speech system of the target language. Thus, if a language does not have a lexical class to fill certain syntactic slot, borrowings of one lexical class come to fill that slot. This hypothesis is applicable only to rigid languages, which become gradually differentiated in the process.

Table 6. An example of lexicalization Diff 4: Source

Verb

Noun

Adjective

Adverb

Rig 6: Target

Verb

Noun

—

—

Syntactic slot

Head predicate phrase

Head referential phrase

Modifier referential phrase

Modifier predicate phrase

Rig 6: Target

Verb

Noun

Adjective

Adverb

All hypotheses imply and exclude each other in several ways. Hypotheses 2–4 have to do with the use of borrowed lexemes. Hypotheses 3–4 are applicable only if hypothesis 2 is not fulfilled because the former imply a change in the parts- of-speech system of the target language while the latter implies no modification. In order to make predictions about Spanish lexical borrowing in IQ, a typological classification of both languages according to their parts of speech is required. This will be done in the next section.

104 Jorge Gómez Rendón 3.4.

A typological classification of Spanish and IQ according to their parts of speech

Imbabura Quechua is a good example of a language that has one lexical class for heads of predicate phrases and one for other syntactic slots. Therefore, IQ is a verb-nonverb language and ranks second in the scale of flexibility of parts-of speech systems. Schachter (1985: 17) gives the following examples to prove this claim. (1)

rikashaka: alkalde+ta see:PST:1SG mayor+ACC12 ‘I saw the mayor’

(2)

chay alkalde runa DEM mayor man ‘that man who is mayor’

(3)

rikashaka: hatun+ta see:PST:1SG big+ACC ‘I saw the big one’

(4)

chay hatun runa DEM big man ‘that big man’

In these examples, hatun is both a referential phrase modifier (4) and a referential phrase head (3); similarly, alkalde is both a modifier of the noun runa (2) and a noun head itself (1). Evidence against this classification has been presented by Beck (2002: 144ff.) and is discussed extensively in Bakker et al. (2008). The arguments presented are insufficient however, and I assume in this paper that Quichua is a language that makes no distinction between nouns, adjectives and adverbs. The functional adaptation of Spanish borrowings as explained in the following sections supports this classification (cf. Tables 10a–b).

3.4.1. The source language: Spanish In broad terms Spanish is a language with a differentiated parts-of-speech system (type 4). There is however some evidence of flexibility with respect to modifiers, though this is not enough to make Spanish a flexible language. The following examples illustrate such claim:

Spanish lexical borrowing in Imbabura Quichua

(5)

105

no

pude tomar el tren rápido could take ART train fast ‘I could not take the fast train’/‘I could not take the train rapidly’ NEG

(6)

el

tiempo pasa rápidamente/rápido ART time pass. by: PRES swiftly /swift ‘Time passes by swiftly’

(7)

dime la verdad sinceramente/sincero* honestly /honest tell: 1DAT ART truth ‘Tell me the truth honestly’

(8)

a. casa-cuna crib-house ‘nursery’

b. pinta-labios paint.lips ‘lipstick’

(9)

a. la

b. la

casa piedra* house stone ‘the stone house’

ART

casa de piedra house of stone ‘the house of stone’

ART

While some Spanish adjectives may be used as predicate phrase modifiers (5–6), others cannot (7) and require the mente ending to this purpose. The first group of adjectives is in fact a closed class. On the other hand, virtually all adjectives can be used as heads of referential phrases but not all nouns may be used as adjectives as illustrated by the ungrammaticality of (9a), where a prepositional connective between both nouns is required to make it a well-formed phrase (9b). Unlike Quechua, Spanish notional nouns cannot be used as modifiers, which could also explain the fact that noun-noun compounds are exceptional in Spanish (8a) as opposed to verb-noun compounds (8b). On these grounds, we claim that Spanish is a type-4 language with specific lexical classes for all syntactic slots, though some degree of flexibility is evidenced in modifiers.

3.5. Expected borrowings from Spanish in Quichua according to parts of speech Spanish and IQ do not have contiguous systems of parts of speech, which has relevant consequences for the kind of borrowings expected and their syntactic use. Excepting hypotheses 1 – applicable only cross-linguistically – and 4 – not relevant because IQ is not a rigid language – the following predictions can be made:

106 Jorge Gómez Rendón a)

Functional adaptation hypothesis: since IQ has only two lexical classes (verbs and non-verbs), nouns, adjectives and adverbs borrowed from Spanish will be used in more than one syntactic position provided leftto-right directionality is observed. b) Functional specialization hypothesis: although IQ has one lexical class of non-verbs, lexemes borrowed from Spanish will be used according to the differentiated system of the source language. Thus verbs and nouns will be distinguished from modifiers. At the same time, some adjectives and adverbs will still be used indistinctively as modifiers. 4.

Phonetic and morphological accommodation of Spanish borrowings in IQ

The changes that Spanish loanwords undergo to be incorporated into IQ are various. The most visible change is the adaptation of Spanish lexemes into the phonological patterns of IQ. There are also few morphological changes, including the maintenance of certain Spanish morphemes. A third process is frozen borrowing, by which complete Spanish phrases are incorporated as unanalyzable units in IQ. 4.1. Phonological accommodation of Spanish borrowings in IQ The main sound changes experienced by Spanish borrowings in IQ have to do with the vowel system. Since Spanish and IQ have different vowel systems, a compromise between both seems to be the solution. (10) a. b. c. d. e.

IQ [mísa] IQ [mísa] / [míza] IQ [pátrun] IQ [últimu] / [último] IQ [prizidínti] / [prisidínte] / [prisidénte]

< Sp. /mésa/ < Sp. /mísa/ < Sp. /patrón/ < Sp. /último/ < Sp. /presidénte/

Spanish medial vowels are raised (/e/ >/i/, /o/ >/u/) or otherwise pronounced as close as possible to their Quichua equivalents (10a, c). Partial assimilation is more common for words with several medial vowels (10e), though nonassimilated Spanish words are not uncommon. Words with more than one medial vowel (10d–e) have different phonetic realizations depending on the environment, the speaker’s level of bilingualism, or the frequency of the word. In fact, the less frequent a word is used in everyday speech, the less

Spanish lexical borrowing in Imbabura Quichua

107

assimilated it is to IQ phonology. For Spanish words with several medial vowels, raising results in various ways to pronounce the same item. Homophones like (10a) and (10b) are usually disambiguated by the voicing of the intermediate sibilant. Nevertheless, phonological accommodation of borrowings is not always rule-governed and may be considered idiosyncratic inasmuch as it depends on the speaker’s level of bilingualism. Another phonological phenomenon found in borrowings across lexical classes is metathesis. While in some cases the syllabic order changes, in others, syllables are deleted or replaced. (11) tempora sañora almotrador

< temporada < zanahoria < administrador

(season, time) (carrot) (administrador)

Finally, a few cases include nouns borrowed in the guise of other nouns but with different meaning. (12) rifuirso (effort) kontrarina (to meet)

< refuerzo < encontrar

(reinforcement) (to meet with)

4.2. Morphological changes in Spanish borrowings in IQ Morphological changes in Spanish borrowings are relatively rare in comparison to phonological ones. As far as parts of speech are concerned, verbs are particularly prone to morphological changes while nouns, adjectives and adverbs are less affected. The most common morphological change is the drop of Spanish verbal endings. Since the stem is the base form to which IQ verbal morphology is added, infinitive endings are dropped systematically. This is not always the case however and one may find a few instances where finite or even cliticized forms serve as the stem for IQ verbal inflection. (13) tuka-ni play-1: PRES ‘I play (music)’

<

toca-

‘play’

(14) akaba-chi-shpa-mi < acaba-CAUS-GER-VAL ‘making [someone] finish [something]’

acaba- ‘finish’

(15) chay tanda dali-kpi-ka < DEM bread give-when-TOP ‘when they give the bread [to someone]’

dali-

‘give (to)’

108 Jorge Gómez Rendón How productive morphological changes are is demonstrated in (14), where a string of verbal and pragmatic particles are suffixed to the base lexeme. Besides, the two original meanings of the Spanish verb (acabar means ‘finish something’ and ‘be finished’) collapse in one by the addition of the causative marker chi. Example (15) seems to be a case of frozen borrowing in which two morphemes are assimilated as a single unit. A number of morphological processes may be operative in nouns and adjectives too. The most noticeable of them has to do with frozen borrowing and results in the double marking of plurals. (16) kosaskunaka kosas-kuna-ka thing:PL-PL-TOP ‘the things’

< cosa + s

< cosas

Spanish plural markers on nouns preceded by numerals are rather infrequent in the corpus. This tendency conforms to IQ, in which plural marking is not obligatory. Spanish gender markers occur often on borrowed adjectives (17). Spanish diminutives (18) and superlatives (19) are rather scarce. (17) kuriusu yana curious be:INF ‘to be curious’

< curioso (masculine)

(18) mamita mother:DIM ‘dear mother (19) papaso father:SUPL ‘grandfather’

4.3. Frozen borrowing of Spanish lexemes Frozen borrowing is the second most common of all accommodation processes of Spanish lexemes into IQ structure, with important consequences for the morphosyntax of the target language. In the present analysis, frozen borrowing not only includes such obvious instances of borrowing as (20a) and (20c) but also more complex expressions like those already reported for massively relexified varieties in other areas of Ecuador (Muysken 1985). A

Spanish lexical borrowing in Imbabura Quichua

109

great number of frozen borrowings include adverbial periphrases and conjunctions frequently used in Spanish. Consider the following examples: (20) a. b. c. d. e. f. g. h. i. j. l. m. n. o.

dirripinti diunabes diltodo masuminos namaski unsolu diuslupagui kalsunbaju diberas kaduno ilkimas loki inki purraya

< de repente < de una vez < del todo < más o menos < nada más que < uno solo < dios le pague < calzon bajo < de veras < cada uno < el que más < lo que < en que < por raya

(suddenly) (at once) (completely) (more or less) (only) (only) (thank you) (long-trousers) (really, actually) (each) (at most) (which) (what) (following the line)

The criteria used to distinguish frozen borrowings from code switches are both phonological and morphosyntactic. On the one hand, frozen expressions have a distinctive stress pattern – main stress on the penultimate syllable on the model of IQ – and differ from Spanish patterns:

(21) ilkimas (22) masuminos (23) diuslupagui

IQ /_-_/ /__-_/ /__-_/

Sp /__-/ /-_-_/ /-__-_/

On the other hand, their individual components cannot be subject either to derivational or inflectional processes. Such is the case of adverbial phrases and noun phrases as shown in (24–25). (24) kalsunbaju long-trousers

kalsunbaju-ta long-trousers-ACC kalsun-ta baju*

kalsunbaju-kuna long-trousers-PL kalsun-kuna baju*

(25) diunabes at.once

diunabes-mari diunabes-EMP diuna-mari bes*

diunabes-tak diunabes-MIT diuna-tak bes*

The syntactic position of frozen borrowings is determined by IQ syntax, in which the components cannot be dislocated (26–27).

110 Jorge Gómez Rendón (26) kunanka ilkimas rundin (ilkimas)* tukarian kunan-ka ilkimas rundin tuka-ria-n pan.flute play-DUR-3PRES today-TOP only ‘Today they play the pan flute only’ (27) kaduno sirbintikunaka (kaduno)* purijurka kada-uno sirbinti-kuna-ka puri-ju-rka go-DUR-3PST each servant-PL-TOP ‘Each employee used to go’ Another process counted as frozen borrowing is the reduplication of Spanish lexemes. Reduplication is common in IQ and serves emphasis. As for parts of speech, the most common of reduplicated items are nouns and manner adverbs (35). (28) bulla13 bulla shamurkanchika bulla bulla shamu-rka-nchi-ka noise noise come-PST-1PL-TOP ‘We came making much noise’ A final issue to be addressed here is that of phrases borrowed seemingly as entire units but interpretable as instances of code switching. Consider the following excerpt: chayka /primero/ watataka /nivela/shpa /cuinta/ /kida/parka, chayra kay watami /primero/guman yaykushka kapan, [primer año de colegio]man, chayka ninanda adilantashka kashka chaymanga.

In this sample text, an entire noun phrase in Spanish (in square brackets) contrasts with other borrowings (in slashes). While I consider these cases arguably ambiguous, I have counted them as cases of code switching and thus not included in this study.

5. Spanish borrowing of lexical classes in IQ: frequencies and tendencies In this section I present the statistics of Spanish borrowings in IQ according to (1) types and tokens; (2) the parts of speech in the source language; and (3) the use of Spanish borrowings according to their syntactic function in IQ. The statistics are analyzed in relation to the predictions made by the theory of parts of speech discussed above. The following table contains the

Spanish lexical borrowing in Imbabura Quichua

111

number of Spanish borrowings in IQ. The figures correspond to three different types of information: lexemes that may be assigned to one part of speech (tokens); lexemes with one or more bound morphemes affixed to them, i.e. words with identifiable phonological and semantic boundaries (types); and the numerical relation between tokens and types which shows the number of occurrences of single words in the corpus (token-type ratio). Numbers in parenthesis show average percentages for all the samples. Table 7. Spanish borrowings in IQ: general percentages Types, Tokens, TTR

Target Language (IQ) Source Language (Sp)

Tokens (mean) Types (mean) TTR

29296 (78.72%) 7660 (78.12%) 3.824

7921 (21.28%) 2145 (21.88%) 3.692

Total 37217 9805 3.795

While the percentage of Spanish borrowings (roughly one fifth of the corpus) evidences a strong lexical influence, these figures are by no means uncommon to other Ecuadorian Quechua dialects. The comprehensive analysis of several Ecuadorian dialects in Bakker et al. (2008) confirms this tendency. Given the amount of lexical borrowing in the language, one may expect several changes in IQ morphosyntax along the scale of borrowing proposed by Thomason and Kaufman (1989: 74–76). And in fact a few Spanish morphemes have been incorporated in IQ together with other deviations from IQ morphosyntax such as the drop of accusative markers, inverted possessive constructions and verb-medial position (cf. Gómez Rendón, forthcoming). The second step of the analysis was to identify to which part of speech borrowings belong in the source language. Table 8 shows the classification of Spanish borrowings according to parts of speech, including tokens and percentages. Table 8. Spanish borrowings in IQ: parts of speech

Tokens

Verbs

Nouns

Adjectives

Adverbs

Others

1336 (16.87%)

4401 (55.56%)

629 (7.94%)

145 (1.83%)

1410 (17.80%)

Nouns (55.56%) represent the largest number of Spanish borrowings, followed by verbs (16.87%), adjectives (7.94%) and adverbs (1.83%). The category “others” include conjunctions, numerals, discourse markers, and

112 Jorge Gómez Rendón other types of adverbs. The results presented here are identical to those found across dialects of Ecuadorian Quechua (Bakker et al. 2008). In order to evaluate the results on the use of Spanish borrowings in IQ, it is necessary to know first the distribution of lexemes across syntactic positions in the recipient language. For this purpose both native and borrowed lexemes were counted in a sample text of 1000 words. The results give a picture of the lexical blueprint of IQ as mapped onto syntactic slots. Table 9. Lexical distribution of syntactic functions in IQ Syntactic Function

Head Pred. Phrase 280

Head Ref. Phrase 273

Modifier Ref. Phrase 50

Modifier Pred. Phrase 125

Table 9 shows no significant difference in the distribution of heads. At the same time modification of predicate phrases is notoriously prolific. The number of heads is larger than the number of modifiers, but the headmodifier ratio is not proportional. Roughly speaking, of two verbs, at least one is modified, while of five nouns, only one is so. This tendency is reflected on the ratio between modifiers in the sample, with more than two predicate phrase modifiers for one referential phrase modifier. In all, the number of lexemes in the position of modifier of predicate phrase shows a strong preference for verbal over nominal modification in the language. Let us consider now the use of Spanish borrowings in the corpus. Loanwords were analyzed for their function in IQ in order to know whether they occupy the same syntactic slots (and thus fulfill the same syntactic function) as in the source language. The following are the results for tokens and types of the main lexical classes.

Spanish lexical borrowing in Imbabura Quichua

113

Table 10 a. Spanish borrowings in IQ: parts of speech versus function (tokens) Syntactic Function

Verbs (Tokens)

Nouns (Tokens)

Adjectives (Tokens)

HP HR MP MR MM

1332 3

49 3971 118 256 7

12 161 89 367

1

Adverbs (Tokens)

125 5 15

Totals 1393 4135 332 629 16

Table 10 b. Spanish borrowings in IQ: parts of speech versus function (types) Syntactic Function

Verbs (Types)

Nouns (Types)

Adjectives (Types)

HP HR MP MR MM

537 3

19 1659 28 181 1

6 117 55 234

1

Adverbs (Types)

39 4 8

Totals 562 1779 122 420 9

HP: Head of Predicate Phrase; HR: Head of Referential Phrase; MP: Modifier of Predicate Phrase; MR: Modifier of Referential Phrase; MM: Modifier of Modifier (of Predicate/Referential Phrase); NP: Noun used as postposition.

Two tendencies may be inferred from the tables above. On the one hand, the prototypical functions of Spanish borrowings according to parts of speech are the most frequent in the recipient language. Accordingly, verbs are used most of the times as heads of predicate phrases while nouns and adjectives are used more often than not as heads and modifiers of referential phrases respectively. This would confirm the hypothesis of functional specialization, but other interpretations are more plausible (cf. infra). On the other hand, while the theory predicts that Spanish nouns, adjectives and adverbs will be used in more than one syntactic position, flexibility seems to be disproved for adverbs but finds strong support for nouns and adjectives. Spanish nouns in IQ seem to be extremely flexible in use, occupying verbal, adjectival and adverbial positions. Likewise, Spanish adjectives are flexible to the extent that they are used not only as heads of referential and predicate phrases but also as modifiers. Not comparable with nouns and adjectives, adverbs show a much lesser degree of flexibility; interestingly Spanish adverbs may be used as modifiers of modifiers just like in Spanish. I explain this tendency

114 Jorge Gómez Rendón of adverbs by resorting to the constraint of directionality as explained in Section 2.3. Examples of the flexible use of Spanish borrowings are discussed in Bakker et al. (2008). I focus now on the interpretation of the data. Different interpretations may be given to the issue of flexibility depending on the approach of the analyst. One approach interprets the use of borrowings across different syntactic functions on the basis of their distribution without any other considerations. From this viewpoint, a widespread distribution such as the one found for nouns and adjectives in Table 10 is sufficient proof of flexibility. Another approach analyses the distribution by taking the prototypical function as the measuring stick. From this viewpoint, the flexible use of borrowings is significant only for nouns and adjectives. Taking a more radical position, one would be tempted to say that only adjectives support the claim of flexibility, as they are the only lexical class that truly shows a widespread distribution across syntactic slots. Whatever the stance we take in the end, we should consider that the data come from a corpus of spontaneous speech and not from elicited texts. Accordingly, we are not to expect a symmetrically distributed set (i.e. 25% of cases for each of the four possible syntactic slots) but instead skewed distributions. Additionally, it is expected that the prototypical functions of borrowed lexemes are preferred more often than not, simply because the forms and meanings are well known to speakers considering their high degree of bilingualism and exposure to Spanish. With these caveats in mind, I make a case for flexibility in the use of Spanish borrowings in IQ. Having analyzed data from other Ecuadorian Quechua dialects from the ‘prototype’ perspective, Bakker et al. (2008) find less strong support for the claim of flexibility, which appears to be even weaker for the other languages of their sample. To the extent that flexibility implies the adaptation of borrowed lexemes to the system of parts of speech of the target language, we are also in a position to state that there is no conclusive evidence pointing to the lexical specialization of non-verbs into nouns and modifiers (type 3). The corollary is that IQ is not undergoing a typological shift and its parts-ofspeech system remains the same in spite of the large number of lexical borrowings in the lexicon. The results for grammatical borrowing for Ecuadorian Quechua (Bakker et al. 2008) are consistent with this view.

Spanish lexical borrowing in Imbabura Quichua

115

6. Final remarks From the social and historical background and the linguistic data collected in fieldwork, it is safe to identify IQ on the third stage of Thomason’s borrowing scale, with high degrees of bilingualism (Büttner 1993: 48–49) and borrowing of non-basic and basic vocabulary. Contact-induced changes in the lexicon include the borrowing of a significant percentage (20%) of vocabulary, including conjunctions and Spanish numerals. Contact-induced structural changes are also present and include Spanish-derived SVO word order, subordinate constructions headed by Spanish conjunctions and SVO clauses, and a few Spanish inflectional affixes of gender and number (cf. Gómez Rendón, forthcoming). The sample analyzed here represents a point of departure from which hypotheses and predictions may be tested on an individual language basis. The next step is to conduct the same analysis on other language pairs and finally compare results cross-linguistically to arrive at possible generalizations about constraints operating on lexical borrowing.

Appendix 1: Informants, age and community of origin and residence Name

Gender

Age

Community

Bernardo Juan María Baltazar Rafael Amalia Ascencio Lizardo

Male Male Male Male Female Male Male

66 67 60 69 56 59 66

El Topo El Topo Casco Valenzuela Casco Valenzuela Angla Angla Angla

Notes 1.

2.

I follow here the convention of calling Quichua the Ecuadorian dialects that form a branch of the Quechua language family. Ecuadorian Quichua is classified as part of Quechua II (Torero 1964) or Quechua A (Parker 1963). All dialects of this subfamily share a number of traits with other varieties from Southern Peru, Bolivia and Argentina (Adelaar 2004: 185 ff). For a linguistic and sociolinguistic description of this language, see GomezRendón 2005.

116 Jorge Gómez Rendón 3.

The survey makes a distinction between Quichua-Spanish bilingualism (i.e. where Quichua is dominant) and Spanish-Quichua bilingualism (where Spanish is dominant). Altogether, the percentages of bilingualism in Casco Valenzuela and El Topo are higher than those reported in other communities of Imbabura, but lower than those for Angla. 4. The few Quichua monolingual speakers in Casco Valenzuela and El Topo are all (old) women. No Quichua monolingual speakers have been found in Angla. 5. The three communities show large numbers of labor migrants to the cities of Ibarra and Quito, with almost one half of the population under thirty years working outside. In the past, virtually all labor migrants were men. Nowadays, an important number of young women travel for work on a regular basis. Labor migration contributes more than fifty percent to the family income. 6. Although there is a bilingual elementary school in El Topo, a considerable percentage (30%) of children attend nearby Spanish monolingual schools. Furthermore, many bilingual teachers are not bilingual per se and teach their subjects either in Spanish or in a mixture of Spanish and Quichua. As it seems, the scenario for a rapid shift to Spanish is set in the classrooms themselves. 7. A list of informants with data about age, community and gender is included in the appendix. 8. For the form and content of testimonial narrative in the context of cultural studies in Latin America, see Beverly (1987). 9. While lexical borrowing includes the incorporation of lexical units, be they free or bound, code switching implies the change of languages in alternating strings of speech or phrases. Particularly difficult for the analysis are cases in which words from two different languages alternate within the same phrase while the structural framework belongs to only one of the languages. The resulting bilingual phrase shares features of lexical borrowing and code switching and may be a good example of intrasentential code switching. For the purposes of this study, cases of intrasentential code switching are not included in the analysis. For a discussion of lexical borrowing, code switching, and their intertwining, see Muysken 2000, Backus 2005, and Field 2005. 10. The statistical results show a difference between tokens and types (expressed in the Token-Type ratio or TTR), which can be explained by the agglutinative nature of the language, with one and the same suffix occurring several times in one sentence. The mean token-type ratio for all the samples is 2.200, meaning that as many as 2,2 tokens for one type occur in the corpus. Note also that neither tokens nor types do strictly correspond to words in Quichua, again because of its agglutinative nature. 11. The reason for restricting adverbs to manner adverbs is that only the latter subclass of adverbs modifies the head of predicate phrases, while other types modify the sentence as a whole (Hengeveld et al. 2004: 6). 12. Abbreviations: 1 = first person, 2 = second person, 3 = third person, ACC = accusative, ADIT = additive, ALL = allative, ART = article, CAUS = causative, COM =

Spanish lexical borrowing in Imbabura Quichua

117

comitative, DAT = dative, DEM = demonstrative, DIM = diminutive, DIR.EV = direct evidence, DUR = durative, EMP = emphasizer, GEN = genitive, GER = gerund, INF = infinitive, INFER = inference, INST = instrumental, INTERP = interpelative, LIM = limitative, LOC = locative, NEG = negative, OBJ = (in)direct object, PERF = perfect, PL = plural, PRES = present, PROL = prolative, PST = past, REP = reportative, SG = singular, SUB = subordinator, SUPL = superlative, TOP = topicalizer 13. Originally, Spanish bulla means both ‘crowd’ and ‘screaming’. The meaning of the borrowing points to the number of people who came and the noise they made.

References Adelaar, Willem, in collaboration with Pieter Muysken 2004 Languages of the Andes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Backus, Ad 2005 Code-switching and language change: one thing leads to another? International Journal of bilingualism 9 (3/4): 307–340. Bakker, Dik, Jorge Gómez Rendón, and Ewald Hekking 2008 Spanish meets Guaraní, Otomí and Quichua: A multilingual confrontation. In Aspects of language contact. New theoretical, methodological and empirical findings with special focus on Romancisation processes, Thomas Stolz, Dik Bakker, and Rosa Salas Palomo (eds.), 165–238. Berlin/NewYork: Mouton de Gruyter. Beck, David 2002 The typology of parts of speech systems: the markedness of adjectives. New York: Routledge. Beverly, John 1987 Anatomía del testimonio, Cap. en Del lazarillo al sandinismo: Estudios sobre la función ideológica de la literatura española e hispanoamericana. Minneapolis: Prisma Institute. Büttner, Thomas 1993 Uso del quichua y el castellano en la Sierra ecuatoriana. Quito: Ediciones Abya Yala. CIEI 1982a Caimi Ñucanchic Shimiyuc-Panca. Quito: Ministerio de Educación y Cultura, PUCE. 1982b Ñucanchic llactapac shimi. Quito: Ministerio de Educación y Cultura, PUCE. Cole, Peter 1982 Imbabura Quechua. Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Company.

118 Jorge Gómez Rendón Dikker, Suzanne 2003 Adpositions in linguistic theory and language contact. Master Thesis. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam. Fauchois, Anne 1988 El quichua serrano frente a la comunicación moderna. Quito: Proyecto EBI, Ediciones Abya Yala. Field. Frederic 2005 Long-term effects of CS: clues to structural borrowing. International Journal of bilingualism 9 (3/4): 341–360. Gómez Rendón, Jorge 2005 La media lengua de Imbabura. In Encuentros y conflictos. Bilingüismo y contacto de lenguas en el mundo andino, Pieter Muysken and Hella Olbertz (eds.), 39–57. Madrid: Vervuert Iberoamericana. forthc. Spanish grammatical borrowing in Imbabura Quechua: an overview. Manchester Project on Grammatical Borrowing. Haboud, Marleen 1998 Quichua y Castellano en los Andes Ecuatorianos: los efectos de un contacto prolongado. Quito: Ediciones Abya Yala. Hengeveld, Kees 1992 Non-verbal predication: theory typology and diachrony. (Functional Grammar Series 15.) Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Hengeveld, Kees, Jan Rijkhoff, and Anna Siewierska 2004 Parts-of-speech systems and word order. Journal of Linguistics 40(3): 527–570. Jijón y Caamaño, Jacinto 1941 El Ecuador Interandino y Occidental. Quito: Editorial Ecuatoriana. Muysken, Pieter 1985 Contactos entre Quichua y Castellano en el Ecuador. In Memorias del Primer Simposio Europeo sobre Antropología del Ecuador, Segundo Moreno (ed.), 377–472. Quito: Abya Yala. 2000 Semantic transparency in Lowland Ecuadorian Quechua morphosyntax: Linguistics 39 (5): 873–988. Myers-Scotton, Carol 2002 Contact linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Parker, Gary 1963 La clasificación genética de los dialectos quechuas. Revista del Museo Nacional 32: 241–252. Schachter, Paul 1985 Parts of speech systems. In Language typology and syntactic description, Timothy Shopen (ed.), 3–61. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Spanish lexical borrowing in Imbabura Quichua

119

Salomon, Frank and Sue Grosboll 1986 Names and peoples in Incaic Quito: retrieving undocumented historic processes through anthroponymy and statistics. American Anthropologist 88: 387–399. Thomason Sarah and Terrence Kaufman 1989 Language contact, creolization and genetic linguistics. Berkeley: University of California Press. Torero, Alfredo 1964 Los dialectos quechuas. Anales Científicos de la Universidad Agraria 2 (4): 446–478. 2003 Idiomas de los Andes. Lima: Centro Cultural Bartolome de las Casas. Van Hout, Roeland and Pieter Muysken 1994 Modelling lexical borrowability. Language variation and change, 6 (1): 39–62.

Spanish prepositions in Media Lengua: Redefining relexification Suzanne Dikker

1. Introduction Media Lengua, which means as much as ‘half language’ or ‘halfway language’, is a contact language between Spanish and Imbabura Quechua1. The variety described here is spoken in central Ecuador, currently by about 1000 native speakers. Media Lengua is an in-between language in many respects. First of all, it forms a linguistic mixture of Quechua and Spanish, which leads to its classification as a Bilingual Mixed Language (Thomason 2001). Geographically speaking, the Media Lengua-speaking community is located between the Spanish blanco world in the valleys and the purely Quechua-speaking villages higher up the mountain slopes. In sociolinguistic terms, Media Lengua was created by men who had Quechua as their native language, but left to work in Spanish-speaking areas (the obreros). When they returned to the community, they had been using Quechua on an infrequent basis, while having acquired a relatively fluent urban Spanish. Media Lengua is spoken by the bilingual middle generation, forming a link between the older, Quechua-speaking generation, and the younger, Spanishspeaking generation. Finally, while Quechua is used in traditional contexts and in situations of contact with the Quechua-speaking farmers, and Spanish is used in school and with the non-Indian world, Media Lengua is the primary language for communication in the every-day life of the community. This paper aims at establishing whether or not Media Lengua should be analyzed as a unique case of language mixture, by studying the incorporation of Spanish adpositions. Section 2 discusses Muysken’s (1981) relexification model, which he designed to account for the structure of Media Lengua. Section 3 explores whether Media Lengua can be accounted for in terms of general principles and constraints on contact-induced language change. Section 4 treats the linguistic status of adpositions, followed by a description and a discussion of the behavior of adpositions in Media Lengua.

122 Suzanne Dikker 2. Media Lengua as a relexified language Muysken (1981; 1997) defines Media Lengua as a relexified language: while the Quechua phonology, morphology, and syntax are preserved, virtually all of the lexical elements are provided by Spanish. Muysken (1997) argues that the different components of a lexical entry (the phonological form, the syntactic properties, the subcategorization features, the semantic properties and the selection criteria) function independently of each other. He formulates this point in the following way: “New relexified forms do not enter as full lexical entries, but as phonological shapes which are grafted onto the original lexical entries. Thus the original entry is not replaced, but merely altered in its own shape.” (Muysken 2000: 266). He furthermore emphasizes that the only requirement for relexification to occur is that the lexical entries of the recipient language (RL, here: Quechua) and the source language (SL, here: Spanish) share some semantic features. As a result, Media Lengua has the same lexical categories as the RL. Finally, there are considerable differences between the relexification of content words, facilitating a straightforward relexification, and function words, which imply a drastic restructuring of the system, because function words do not carry any meaning outside the linguistic system that they are part of. This explains why virtually only content words are relexified. The results of relexification in Media Lengua are illustrated by the following example: 2 (1)

a. Media Lengua unu fabur-ta pidi-nga-bu bini-xu-ni one favor-ACC3 ask-NOM-BEN come-PROG-1 ‘I come to ask a favor’ b. Quechua shuk fabur-da

maña-nga-bu

shamu-xu-ni

c. Spanish vengo para pedir un favor This example clearly shows how the replacement of phonological shapes of Quechua stems with Spanish forms comes about, in for example the replacement of maña by pidi. It also shows that the original structure of Quechua is maintained. From the Spanish forms in the Media Lengua sentence, it can be seen that in the process of incorporation, they undergo regularization (e.g., Sp: vengo4  ML: bini) and adaptation to the Quechua morpho-phonology (e.g., Sp: favor  ML: fabur-ta). From the fact that

Spanish prepositions in Media Lengua: Redefining relexification

123

Media Lengua is not random and creative, in addition to the observation that lexical items come predominantly from one language (90% Spanish), it can be discarded that Media Lengua is an instance of ‘deep’ intrasentential codeswitching (Muysken 1997). 3.

Relexification and ‘normal’ contact-induced language change

Muysken’s account for the structure of Media Lengua suggests that the process of relexification may be qualitatively distinct from other, ‘normal’, instances of contact-induced language change (CiCh). This section discusses general principles and restrictions on CiCh, exploring whether Media Lengua follows these, or, alternatively, a separate account like Muysken’s is indeed warranted. 3.1. Social factors Various viewpoints have been defended with regard to the identification of the main triggers of CiCh. It is largely uncontroversial to assume that the social situation of actual contact between two or more languages (or dialects, for that matter), is a necessary first requirement for any form of this type of change to occur. Thomason (2001) stresses this point specifically, since she feels that a number of scholars seem to have lost touch with this common-sense point. The intensity and duration of contact are of considerable influence on the extent to which the linguistic systems of the languages in contact are affected (Thomason 2001; Campbell 1998). Another quantitative measure, group size, is subordinate to the relative social positions of the communities in contact, since the minority status of a group, usually consisting of speakers of the language(s) most affected in terms of CiCh, is defined in terms of social status (subordination and superordination) rather than size. The relative social positioning of the languages in contact determines whether the type of CiCh that is observed either classifiable as interference or as borrowing. Interference occurs when a superordinate language is imposed upon a minority group. This situation of massive L2 acquisition often results in an imperfect and fossilized non-target final stage, generally simplified and containing many L1 elements. While interference occurs from the first to the second language (L1  L2), in the case of borrowing non-native items are taken over from the second language into the native language (L2  L1). Within this dichotomy, Media Lengua could be classified as a case of borrowing rather than interference,

124 Suzanne Dikker since what is observed is the incorporation of non-native elements (Spanish) into the first language (Quechua). Milroy (1993) emphasizes – for both diachronic and contact-induced change – the role of specific members of a language community in language change, namely those with the highest number of ‘weak-ties’ within and outside of the community. In the Media Lengua-speaking community, the obreros can be identified as forming such a group. Milroy concludes that linguistic change is a social phenomenon, which comes as a result of the desire to mark social identity. He goes as far as saying that if no social meaning is attached to it, change will not occur. Thomason (2001) also states that the speakers’ attitude is ultimately responsible for the failure of other substantive predictors. This entails that whatever change is triggered, it can be halted or accelerated by the speakers’ attitude. Thomason’s (2001) viewpoint on CiCh is reflected in the following hierarchy: (2)

Speakers’ attitude > social factors > linguistic factors

This scale implies that Media Lengua-speakers play a decisive role in its maintenance, i.e., whether or not it forms an intermediate stage in the process of language-shift from Quechua to Spanish. The fact that it has disappeared in some communities, like Salcedo, where Muysken discovered it, suggests that, at least in those communities, Media Lengua did indeed form a transitional stage toward language shift. In other communities, however, it is unlikely that Media Lengua will disappear in the near future: it is used in schools5 and by influential members of the community. It thus seems that social prestige is a very important factor in the maintenance or loss of Media Lengua. Campbell (1993) also emphasizes the role of prestige in the process of borrowing, which they illustrate with examples of lexical borrowings as well as borrowed particles into Spanish and Amerindian languages respectively. The extent of bilingualism within a community has been shown to accelerate the process of CiCh (e.g., Brody 1987). For example, it has been argued that in the case of fully-fledged bilingualism, features of one of the language systems can ‘leak’ into the other language system. Stolz and Stolz (1996) argue that bilingualism is not a necessary requirement for CiCh, as they observed instances of incorporated Spanish structures in the language of monolingual (elderly) speakers. However, these two views are not necessarily incompatible: it is not unlikely that bilingual members of the community represent the initiators of CiCh, subsequently ‘infecting’ other, monolingual speakers of the community. This scenario is compatible with the

Spanish prepositions in Media Lengua: Redefining relexification

125

emergence of Media Lengua: the bilingual obreros created Media Lengua, after which it spread to the rest of the community as a function of expressing a mixed identity in changing times.

3.2. Linguistic factors In contrast to Thomason (2001), who argues that in CiCh “purely linguistic considerations are relevant but strictly secondary overall”, several scholars, amongst whom formalists like Lightfoot (e.g., 1991) state that syntactic change operates autonomously, i.e., independent of any possible semantic, pragmatic, discourse or sociolinguistic factors. This point of view correlates with the assumption of a strictly independent language faculty, like Universal Grammar. Because of the independence and unconsciousness of this language faculty, the course of CiCh could hardly be argued to depend on language-external factors. It is difficult to capture the existence of Media Lengua without taking into account language-external factors. However, it is not unthinkable that specific internal factors have played a role not so much in the mere existence of a contact language in the communities at hand, but considerably so in the final form Media Lengua has taken. Muysken (1999) proposes three linguistic universals of CiCh6: 1. CiCh occurs in function of filling functional gaps, 2. CiCh in tendency follows the innovatory possibilities of the changing language(s) involved, and 3. CiCh can only occur at those modules of syntax where the languages in contact are structurally compatible. The first universal is considered an important motivator for CiCh by a number of scholars (e.g., Campbell 1993). Campbell argues that this explains the extensive amount of Spanish coordinators and subordinators that are incorporated into Pipil (an Amerindian language from El Salvador), since this language was originally paratactic and therefore lacked these categories. Both Bakker and Hekking (1999) and Stolz and Stolz (1996) discuss the incorporation of prepositions in several Amerindian languages7. While Bakker and Hekking (1999) conclude that the presence of Spanish prepositions in Otomí should be understood as the result of a functional gap, Stolz and Stolz (1996) discard this type of analysis for their d