Studies in Language Companion Series

Acquisition, Loss and Innovation in Chuquisaca Quechua—What Happened to Evidential Marking?

“…Pre-existing structural congruence between L1 and L2 may have facilitated this convergence since both Quechua and Spanish allow for third person verbs of saying to appear without subjects, blurring any distinction between quotative and reportive speech. This finding conforms to the observation of typological shift made by Hintz (2016), namely that Quechua languages are becoming more analytic, so that forms previously expressed by enclitics or suffixes are now expressed by forms of freestanding verbs.…”

“…The evidence that the verb of saying ñiy might be evolving into a reportive marker is suggestive of the pattern of suffix renewal in morphologically complex languages, outlined for the Quechua language by Hintz (2016), the diachronic pattern for Korean (Ahn and Yap 2014) and for many world languages outlined by Aikhenvald (2015). This could be the end of the story: purely internal forces of suffix suppression and renewal may have caused the attrition of the evidential values of -min and -sis in Bolivia, and also caused an increased productivity of the verb of saying ñiy as a reportive marker in narratives and personal reflections.…”

“…If we were to find that reportive evidentiality is beginning to be marked via freestanding words rather than suffixes in both Quechua (a language that traditionally marks this distinction through agglutinating morphology) and Spanish (a language that traditionally only marks evidentiality lexically or clausally), the convergence hypothesis would find support, as has already been claimed for the contact variety of Spanish by Babel (2009), and for both Spanish and Quechua in Cochabamba by Dankel and Soto Rodríguez (2012). The typological shift hypothesis, which traces the post-contact surge in auxiliary verb constructions expressing aspect around the Quechua language family (Hintz 2011(Hintz , 2016 would find support in the same set of facts as the convergence hypothesis, for overlapping reasons related to the influence that Spanish and Quechua exert on each other. Namely, the convergence hypothesis recognizes the clustering of new functional feature combinations at the level of grammatical categories in the bilingual mind, and the typological shift hypothesis recognizes that suppression of suffix formation and increased production of freestanding verbs contribute over time to a more isolating morphology.…”

“…(C) Is there a variety of Bolivian Quechua where evidential enclitics are still in use? In this article I will explore three hypotheses: morpho-syntactic attrition occurs in reverse order of child language acquisition (Montrul 2013, p. 212); convergence characterizes the emergence of new grammatical forms different from L1 and L2 in contact situations ( Sánchez 2003); and the Quechua languages are undergoing typological shift toward more isolating morphology (Hintz 2011(Hintz , 2016.…”

A Balkan View on the Left Periphery: Modal and Discourse Particles

“…Bulgarian šte is also uninflected as a future marker, but fully inflects as a main verb (šta, šteš, šte, etc.) (for a descriptive presentation regarding Bulgarian and Macedonian, see Lindstedt 2010). To the extent that the original volitional verb survives in the languages under consideration, we observe that the future particle is either a form that coincides with the 3rd person singular, or an uninflected form (stem, or a reduced form of the stem).…”