We examine the extent to which practices of language use may be diffused through language contact and areally shared, using data on spatial reference frame use by speakers of eight indigenous languages from in and around the Mesoamerican linguistic area and three varieties of Spanish. Regression models show that the frequency of L2-Spanish use by speakers of the indigenous languages predicts the use of relative reference frames in the L1 even when literacy and education levels are accounted for. A significant difference in frame use between the Mesoamerican and non-Mesoamerican indigenous languages further supports the contact diffusion analysis.
Algunas lenguas otomíes (otomangue, otopame) se han descrito como lenguas con el tiempo y el modo como categorías primarias de TAM, mientras que en otras se considera al aspecto y al modo como primarias. Este trabajo describe las categorías aspectuales del otomí de Acazulco (Ocoyoacac, estado de México) a partir de textos orales en un corpus en línea. Por medio de la comparación de los rasgos paradigmáticos, semánticos y morfológicos de las categorías del sistema de TAM, se muestra que el tiempo es una categoría secundaria con respecto al aspecto. Este trabajo propone también una serie de líneas de investigación relevantes a la comparación de los sistemas de TAM en lenguas otomíes, así como a temas en tipología lingüística.
Acazulco Otomi (Oto-Pamean, Oto-Manguean) is an endangered language spoken by about 200 elderly people in San Jerónimo Acazulco, a village located 35 km Southwest from Mexico City (Mexico). The language is tonal, verb-initial and headmarking. This language has four inflectional classes of verbs, which differ from each other (a) in the allomorphs of tense-aspect-mood proclitics they select, and (b) in the type of stem alternations they present across their paradigm. Although class membership is a lexical property for each particular verb, the existence of verb pairs across different classes suggests that the classes emerged from valence-changing morphological strategies that are no longer productive nowadays. This chapter shows how the historical development of inflectional classes of verbs in Acazulco Otomi might have occurred. In addition, it discusses the possibility that one of these classes, which I treat as class IV, may still be under the process of lexicalization.
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