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Quechua to Spanish Cross-Linguistic Influence Among Cuzco Quechua-Spanish Bilinguals: The Case of Epistemology

Throughout the course of this dissertation, I respond to three related research goals. In order to investigate these goals, I gathered data from 169 members of two Cuzco, Peru non-profit governmental agencies, the Asociación Civil 'Gregorio Condori Mamani' Proyecto Casa del Cargador, 'Gregorio Condori Mamani' Civil Association House of the Carrier Project' and El Centro de Apoyo Integral a la Trabajadora del Hogar, 'Center for the Integral Support of Female Home Workers'. The majority of my participants speaks Quechua natively and acquired Spanish as an L2 during childhood or adolescence. I collected data from these two populations through the means of ethnography, demographic questionnaires, a social network analysis, a language attitudes study, elicitation of short narratives, role play interviews and a subjective reaction test. In response to my first research goal, I examine the nature of the semantics and pragmatics of the Cuzco Quechua epistemic system, including the epistemic suffixes, -mi/-n and -si/-s, and the Quechua verb past tenses, -rqa- and -sqa-. I find the Quechua epistemics to encode meaning beyond information source and level of certainty and to be affected by a variety of discourse factors. In my treatment of my second research goal, I find 31 different phonetic, morphosyntactic, and calque Quechua to Spanish cross-linguistic influence features to occur in my participants' speech. I also examine the specific case of the cross-linguistic influence of the Quechua epistemic system on the Spanish spoken by my participants. The presence of cross-linguistic influence in my participants' speech supports a model of child SLA in which the L1 plays a significant role in the acquisition of the L2. Finally, in response to my third research goal, I find various demographic characteristics, social network characteristics, and the language attitudes of my participants to correlate with their production of the 31 Quechua to Spanish phonetic, morphosyntactic, and calque cross-linguistic features. While presenting my results for my third research goal, I suggest that my participants may purposefully use various Quechua cross-linguistic features in order to identify themselves as Quechua speakers and distinguish themselves from native Spanish speakers, thereby creating an in-group variety of Spanish.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:PITT/oai:PITTETD:etd-04282004-184043
Date24 June 2004
CreatorsFeke, Marilyn Suzanne
ContributorsProfessor Susan Berk-Seligson, Professor Bruce Stiehm, Professor Scott Fabius Kiesling, Professor Barbara Johnstone
PublisherUniversity of Pittsburgh
Source SetsUniversity of Pittsburgh
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
Sourcehttp://etd.library.pitt.edu/ETD/available/etd-04282004-184043/
Rightsunrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University of Pittsburgh or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report.

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