Linguistics Colloquium: Gladys Camacho-Rios

18 Cleveland Place, Boston MA

Description

Gladys Camacho-Rios (University of Texas at Austin) joins us to deliver a colloquium entitled "Morphological variation in South Bolivian Quechua: A new approach to Quechuan typology" (abstract below). Free and open to the public. This event will take place via Zoom. Register (to receive the meeting link) by 3/31 at: bit.ly/bulingspring21 Abstract: This talk examines variation in the use of complex verb morphology between monolingual and Quechua-Spanish bilingual speakers of South Bolivian Quechua, based on recordings of spontaneous conversations. The study compares recordings of monolingual speakers from rural areas and bilinguals from urban areas. For both groups, verbal words are minimally composed of a verb root, which is always initial, and one inflectional bound morpheme, which marks person, number, tense and mood (1). Additional derivational suffixes can appear on the verb stem to convey causative, sociative causation, locative, spatial, affective, manner and other meanings as in (2). (1) wayk’u-saq cook-1SG.FUT ‘I will cook’ (2) kuti-yu-ri-chi-kampu-sha-rqa-ni return-ASP-AFF-CAUS-MOT-PROG-PST.REP-1SG.NF ‘I was bringing my sheep back home’ However, the exponence of derivational morphology in the verb varies between monolingual speakers and bilinguals. Verbal morphology used by monolinguals has more derivational suffixes, both simplex and complex; similarly, it has more suffix strings, whereas bilingual speakers exhibit a smaller vocabulary of suffixes. An ANOVA revealed a highly significant effect of language background between monolinguals and bilinguals (B=0.24612, t=21.038, p<0.001) on the total count of derivational suffixes. Thus, monolingual speakers used more derivational suffixes than bilinguals. The variation in morphological complexity between these two groups includes grammatical categories such as associated motion morphemes, semantically complex suffix strings, and use of morphology to create verbal art. Finally, by contextualizing social factors affecting each group, and comparing rural and urban regional dialects, as well as analyzing the morphological variation, I will provide new insights for Quechua typology. Made possible through the Emerging Scholars Program funded jointly by BU's Office of the Provost and the CAS Dean's Office. https://fb.me/e/17bIetwDg