The morphosyntactic behavior of pronominal anaphora in the Andean children ́s Spanish of La Mar (Ayacucho)

Abstract

This paper represents an explanatory study focused on a variety of Andean Spanish spoken by children from La Mar (Ayacucho), a southern Andean area in Peru where Quechua and Spanish are in a situation of language contact. The objective is to characterize the morphosyntactic behavior of Spanish anaphoric pronominal forms by appealing to the influence of the Quechua language in terms of transfer processes. The linguistic manifestations of this sector of the population are described with a qualitative approach based on semi-directed interviews. The corpus consists of twenty hours of tape recordings containing conversations with children from eight to ten years old, collected in 2019. As a result of the analysis, morphosyntactic transfer processes of the Quechua language are evidenced in the behavior of reflexive, reciprocal, personal and possessive anaphora of Spanish. The results, although they coincide in part with those disseminated by the specialized literature in the adult population, allow us to prove that the age factor does not play a differentiating role in the development of these phenomena in contexts of language contact.