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Dialect and Language Contact Perspectives
This book, the first of its kind, is dedicated to different Spanish varieties spoken in the Amazonian regions of Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia. The contributions present diverse perspectives on theoretical, methodological, and descriptive characterizations of the study of Amazonian Spanish. It includes linguistic (phonological, syntactic, discourse-pragmatic), typological, ethnographic, sociolinguistic, and language contact approaches. The analyses of oral corpora include comparisons between monolingual and contact varieties of the speech of bilingual speakers who are native speakers of an indigenous Amazonian variety. This collection contributes to the fields of Hispanic and Amerindian Linguistics, and language contact.
Dialect and Language Contact Perspectives
This book, the first of its kind, is dedicated to different Spanish varieties spoken in the Amazonian regions of Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia. The contributions present diverse perspectives on theoretical, methodological, and descriptive characterizations of the study of Amazonian Spanish. It includes linguistic (phonological, syntactic, discourse-pragmatic), typological, ethnographic, sociolinguistic, and language contact approaches. The analyses of oral corpora include comparisons between monolingual and contact varieties of the speech of bilingual speakers who are native speakers of an indigenous Amazonian variety. This collection contributes to the fields of Hispanic and Amerindian Linguistics, and language contact.
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Abstracto
Dephonologization of the opposition between the lateral palatal /ʎ/ and the approximant non-lateral palatal /j/, merging into one single phoneme, /j/, is known as yeísmo. This phenomenon has been long identified and much studied in Spanish varieties, both in Spain and in America. (cf. Gómez & Molina 2013). This chapter examines the use of voiced palatals in the spontaneous speech of monolingual speakers from the Iquitos community (Loreto, Peru); these include speakers who have attained a higher education and speakers with low levels of literacy. The data examined show that, contrary to what was proposed by Ramírez (2003) and later restated by Marticorena (2010), there is no clear rephonologization of the laterals in this region. This chapter also discussed Escobar’s hypothesis (1981) that palatals are allophones of a single phoneme. However, the outcome of this chapter supports the claims by Escobar (1978) and Caravedo (1995, 2013), which indicate that Amazonian yeísmo is still in a process of ongoing change.
7 Depalatalization and Delateralization in the Ecuadorian Amazon: Spanish /ʎ/ in Contact with Kichwa
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This study examines the palatal lateral /ʎ/ in Spanish as produced by Kichwa-Spanish bilinguals in the Ecuadorian Amazon. While there is a general trend in Spanish towards loss of the etymological /ʎ/-/ʝ/ contrast, maintenance is reported for some varieties, including those in contact with languages with the phoneme in their native inventory. However, support through contact may also produce results not found in non-contact varieties, such as allophonic variation of /ʎ/ to [l] before the high front vowel [i], as in Kichwa. To examine this possibility, recordings of both male and female speakers were made and analyzed acoustically according to three types of measures: consonant duration, formant height (F2), and C/V intensity ratio as a measure of consonant constriction. From these analyses, we find that while there is maintenance of /ʎ/, both groups show cases of depalatalization to [l], while females show some tendencies towards delateralization to [ʝ] (i.e., yeísmo). A qualitative examination of /ʎ l ʝ/ is also given in Kichwa as an initial point of comparison. This research demonstrates the need for more acoustic work to observe changes in the sound inventory in varieties of Spanish, and the allophonic variation that may result from language contact.
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Studies attempting to understand the particularity of Peruvian Amazonian Spanish emphasize the widespread presence of Quechua loanwords as one of its most characteristic features. This is easy to confirm by checking the available regional dictionaries, for instance, Tovar (1966), Castonguay (1990) or Chirif (2017), where we find hundreds of entries with a Quechua etymology. This paper offers the first systematic study of the phonological, morphological and dialectal characteristics of the Quechua loanwords attested in Peruvian Amazonian Spanish. Although many of the features attested in the Quechua loanwords of Peruvian Amazonian Spanish are found throughout the whole Quechua language family, others do suggest a specific dialectal affiliation and are crucial for this study. One of the most significant discoveries of this paper is that the Quechua loanwords attested in Peruvian Andean Spanish reveal that they do not come from a single Quechua dialect, as has been traditionally assumed. Although the phonetic-phonological features point towards Amazonian Quechua, the morphological and lexical features described in this paper suggest a significant dialectal diversity that has not been previously proposed in the literature.
Abstracto
The Oral Corpus of the Atlas Lingüístico-Etnográfico de Colombia (ALEC) is composed of 650 hours of recordings collected during research conducted in Colombia between 1956 and 1983. This corpus includes 45 speaking sample audio files collected in the Amazonian region (departments of Putumayo, Caquetá, Amazonas). These sound files are a representative sample of the Spanish spoken in the region. The Corpus Linguistics and Computational Research Group (grupo de Lingüística de corpus y computacional, LICC) of the Instituto Caro y Cuervo has worked on the systematization of these files using both structural and descriptive metadata. The goal is to make available linguistic conservation material to the academic community, with information that can be exploited for diverse quantitative and/or qualitative analyses from different language levels (phonetic-phonological, morphosyntactic, lexical-semantic, and pragmatic.).
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Applying traditional (linguistic) methodologies to research with ethnocultural populations presents challenges (Trimble & Fisher 2006). The study of contact between Indigenous languages and a global language (e.g., Spanish) inevitably questions traditionally understood social correlates, such as population composition, age and gender distribution, social networks, degree of urbanization, and others. A comparison of the socio-linguistic profiles of Peruvian Andean and Amazonian Spanish populations highlights the need to rethink additional theoretical concepts regarding linguistic diversity, linguistic density, and language acquisition to define better the concept of ‘Amazonian Spanish.’ A call to focus on cross-linguistic conceptual grammatical categories is exemplified with ‘possession’ to suggest potential new paths of studying linguistic influence in these contact scenarios.
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We study variability in the distribution of third person accusative clitics and gender neutralization in direct object clitic doubling, and in anaphoric expressions in the narratives of two groups of speakers of Amazonian bilingual Spanish varieties. The two groups are in contact with two typologically different and geographically distant Amazonian languages, Shipibo and Ashaninka. We argue that the scalar systems of Spanish clitics found in both groups, characterized by low frequency of gender marking, are due to access to a reduced subset of features in the sense of Mufwene (2001, 2002), where competition and selection of features depend on the language ecological factors such as social networks, input, and stage of language acquisition.
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The present study explores the prosodic manifestations of focus marking in Peruvian Amazonian Spanish (PAS), as spoken in the city of Pucallpa. Foundational work on PAS intonation has provided us with a general depiction of its declaratives and interrogatives (Elias-Ulloa, 2015; García, 2011). However, little is known about how focus is conveyed through PAS intonation. In this paper, I explore four prosodic cues in PAS declaratives: tonal alignment, syllable duration, tonal height, and the presence of pre- and post-focal pitch accents. Following the Autosegmental-Metrical (AM) framework of intonational phonology (Ladd 1996, 2008; Pierrehumbert, 1980), I acoustically analyze these prosodic cues from a reading task produced by 13 monolingual PAS speakers. Results show that PAS speakers employ tonal alignment to distinguish broad, narrow, and contrastive focus declaratives. Syllable duration is also used for focus distinction. Moreover, the patterns of tonal height vary across focus types. Finally, unlike other Spanish varieties, deaccentuation in PAS is not prevalent in narrow or contrastive focus declaratives; PAS speakers produce both pre- and post-focal pitch accents. Together, these new findings about PAS’s intonational system help us situate it into the larger research of focus marking in Spanish.
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This chapter provides an introduction to the collection of studies on Amazonian Spanish. It summarizes the socio-historical context of the formation of Colombian, Ecuadorian and Peruvian Amazonian varieties, and offers geographical and demographic information of the Amazonian regions in these countries where the data were collected. The authors address the interconnectedness between the Andes and the Amazon since pre-Colonial times, and the role of the Andean piedmont in their articulation. They highlight the crucial role of multilingualism and language contact in the formation of Amazonian Spanishes, and point out that despite this great diversity, there is evidence of Pan-Amazonian Spanish linguistic features spread in Ecuador, Peru, and Colombia.
Abstract
Peruvian Amazonian Spanish (PAS) is a linguistic variety formed under intense, long-standing contact with Quechua, indigenous Western Amazonian languages and, to a lesser degree, Portuguese. PAS displays distinctive phonological, lexical, morphosyntactic and pragmatic characteristics which differentiate it from other Spanish dialects (Escobar, 1978; Ramírez, 2003; Marticorena, 2010). This article provides a synchronic account of the PAS expression ya vuelta, based mainly on the analysis of naturalistic oral data gathered in three different locations of the Loreto Region: Iquitos, Jeberos and Lagunas. We claim that ya vuelta is a discourse marker (DM), that is, a linguistic expression that operates beyond the sentence level and realizes discourse-pragmatic functions (Schiffrin, 1987, 2003; Fraser, 1988, 1990; Company, 2006; among others). Moreover, most of these functions fall under the umbrella of mirativity, a notion associated with the encoding of surprise, unpreparedness on the part of the speaker and similar states (DeLancey, 1997, 2001, 2012; Aikhenvald, 2012; Peterson, 2013). It has been suggested that the PAS expression ya vuelta arose in a situation of intense contact between Spanish and Quechua (Marticorena, 2010, p. 95). To our knowledge, the present article is the first work devoted to the study of a discourse marker in Peruvian Amazonian Spanish.