Vamos en Palma ‘we are going to Palma’
On the persistence (and demise) of a contact feature in the
Spanish of Majorca
This study analyzes historical and contemporary data of
Spanish produced by Catalan-dominant bilinguals in Majorca to
explore the origin and historical evolution of a contact feature of
Majorcan Spanish: the preposition en to express
direction of movement. The transgenerational survival of this
feature of Majorcan Spanish for over three centuries points to a
scenario of intra-community recycling of a structure that emerged as
the result of incomplete grammatical competence in Spanish and was
then perpetuated by limited contact with monolingual Spanish
speakers. The changing linguistic ecology of Majorca, however, with
wider access to canonical varieties of Spanish in the last half
century, has facilitated the demise of this trait among younger
urban generations.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Data and methodology
- 3.Directional uses of en
- 4.Looking for the source of Majorcan Spanish directional
en
- 4.1Majorcan Catalan
- 4.2Simplification and hypergeneralization
- 4.3Historical data
- 5.On the historical continuity of directional en
- 6.Summary and conclusions
-
Acknowledgments
-
Notes
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References