About the Use of Tag Questions in Andean Spanish
This paper aims to describe the use of tag questions in the variety of Andean Spanish spoken in Bolivia. In particular, it explores the tag questions that occur in the Corpus oral del español hablado por bilingües de aymara-español. The analysis consists of two levels. On the one hand, it describes the pragmatic functions of tag questions and identifies the correlation between their distribution and their pragmatic functions. On the other hand, it focuses on the impact that social factors (the speakers’ sex, age, and education) have on the frequency of the tags. Along these lines, it displays the lack of a general sociolinguistic trend in the use of tag questions, furthermore, it shows that…
Pragmatic markers resulting from language contact. The case of sañani in Aymara
This paper explores the pragmatic functions of a previously unattested pragmatic marker (Fraser, 1996, 2006) found in Aymara, i.e. sanani ‘let’s say’. The uses of sanani suggest that this marker is the result of the influence of Spanish on Aymara due to sustained language contact. Sanani seems to be the “replication” (Heine and Kuteva, 2005) of the Spanish pragmatic marker digamos ‘let’s say’. Like digamos (Grande Alija, 2010; Quartararo, 2017a), sanani functions as a pragmatic marker by signaling either an inferential process or the semantic relation between two discourse segments. The original data used for this analysis was gathered through the Family Problems Picture task (San Roque et …
Epistemic uses of the pretérito pluscuamperfecto in La Paz Spanish
This paper explores epistemic-evidential uses of the pluperfect, i.e. pretérito pluscuamperfecto, in La Paz Spanish. The pretérito pluscuamperfecto displays functions of a reported evidential form, conforming to results from previous studies on Argentinian Spanish (Bermúdez 2008; Speranza 2014) and, furthermore, is used according to a previously unnoticed inferential evidential function. Using theoretical frameworks from Kockelman (1957) and Bergqvist (2018), this paper describes the configuration of participant roles and event types implied in the different evidential functions of the pretérito pluscuamperfecto.
The Habitual ‘Saber + Infinitive’ in South American Spanish
The present paper aims to describe both synchronic and diachronic distributions of the habitual aspectual periphrasis ‘saber + infinitive’ in the varieties of Spanish spoken in the South American continent. The data used for the present analysis come from the Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual and the Corpus del Español del Siglo XXI.
The asymmetric Path-conflation pattern of GO and COME verbs in Aymara
This paper investigates the basic motion verbs sara ‘go’ and juta ‘come’ in Aymara, an indigenous language of the Andes, within the framework of Talmy’s lexical typology (Talmy 2000). In a crosslinguistic perspective, ‘come’ and ‘go’ are assumed to be deictically complementary and have been represented as a kind of Path-conflating verbs, i.e. verbs that include the deictic component of Path in their lexical semantics, which is respectively the direction ‘toward the speaker’ vs that ‘not toward the speaker’. Data from Aymara show in fact that ‘come’ and ‘go’ exhibit an asymmetrical Path-conflation pattern: ‘come’ does inherently entail deictic motion toward the speaker, whereas ‘go’ indicate…
Apéndices interrogativos: el caso de ‘¿no ve?’ en el español de los bilingües aymara-español
This paper offers an insight to the description of the tag question ¿no ve? in the variety of Spanish spoken by bilinguals of Aymara-Spanish. The analysis identifies the relation between the position of ¿no ve? and its pragmatic functions. Furthermore, it displays the multidimensionality of this tag question that may operate on different conversational layers at the same time. The study also describes the impact of social factors (sex, age and education) on the use of ¿no ve?. The original data used for the present analysis comes from the Corpus oral del español hablado por bilingües de aymara-español (Quartararo 2021).