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Part of
Contemporary Trends in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics: Selected papers from the Hispanic Linguistic Symposium 2015
Edited by Jonathan E. MacDonald
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 15] 2018
► pp. 259–280

Chapter 12
“Extraña uno lo que es la tortillas”

A preliminary study of number agreement in Spanish in contact with Purépecha

| Indiana University

Regarding studies of Spanish in contact with Latin American indigenous languages, there has been little research on contact between Spanish and Purépecha, a language isolate from western Mexico. The present paper addresses this lacuna by examining number marking and number agreement in the Spanish production of five L1 adult Purépecha speakers, and it contributes to both the fields of second language studies and contact linguistics studies, by detecting specific structural and semantic conditions under which Purépecha morphosyntactic patterns are incorporated into Spanish: Results show non-standard number marking and lack of number agreement across the noun phrase, between the subject and the verb, and between the noun and its predicative adjective, possibly due to a shift dynamic (Thomason, 2001).

Keywords: Purépecha, Spanish, number agreement, interference, contact linguistics
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • 1.Background
    • 1.1Early second language acquisition
    • 1.2Contact varieties
    • 1.3The syntax and semantics of number, number features in Purépecha, and the mass/count distinction
      • 1.3.1The syntax and semantics of number, and number features in Purépecha
      • 1.3.2The mass/count distinction in Purépecha
    • 1.4Overview of number marking in contact varieties and SLA studies
      • 1.4.1Number agreement within the NP
      • 1.4.2Subject-verb agreement
  • 2.The present study
    • 2.1Theoretical framework
    • 2.2Hypotheses
    • 2.3The informants
    • 2.4Data collection methodology
  • 3.Results and discussion
    • 3.1Number agreement within the NP
    • 3.2Subject-verb agreement
    • 3.3Agreement in predication
  • 4.Conclusions and future directions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 14 February 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.15.13moj
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