Series
Studies in Slavic and General Linguistics
Article
City
Amsterdam - Atlanta, GA
ISBN
9042013222
Publication Date
January 2000
Journal/Book Title/Conference
Language in Contact
Volume
28
Abstract
Languages long in contact in the Andean countries, Quechua and Spanish are intriguing partners in bilingual speech because they exhibit very different word order patterns. In a study exploring the development of Spanish word order in Quechua-speaking children, Minaya & Luján (1982) reported that children frequently produced "hybrid" (S)VOV structures. They proposed that the children had a transitional grammar with a nonadult phrase structure rule. This study presents a vigorous challenge to this claim. First, both adult and child speakers of Quechua duplicate not only verbs, but a variety of constituent types, presumably for emphatic effect. Second, the Minaya & Luján proposal attributed to the children a transitional "wild grammar." It will be shown that the appearance of the VOV pattern in child L2 Spanish clearly represents transfer of a pragmatic strategy and not a transitional, illicit, hybrid grammar.
Editor
D. Gilbers, J. Nerbonne and J. Schaeken
Publisher
Rodopi
Publisher Statement
The definitive version of this chapter was published in Languages in Contact, Studies in Slavic and General Linguistics, volume 28, by Rodopi, Amsterdam-Atlanta, GA, 2000. http://www.rodopi.nl/functions/search.asp?BookId=ssgl+28.