Grammatical gender and indexical gender: demonstrative uso in Peruvian Amazonian Spanish
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.30920/letras.96.144.5Abstract
This study examines Spanish spoken in the Peruvian Amazon to investigate contact effects in the patterns of variation in gender agreement between demonstratives and their anaphors. To evaluate contact effects, we compared samples of Spanish speakers from Kukama villages and the city of Iquitos. While Kukama has indexical gender that encodes the gender of the participants in the speech act, Spanish has grammatical gender that categorizes nouns into defined classes. Considering their sociolinguistic profile, participants were organized into three groups: a) Spanish monolinguals; b) Kukama/Spanish bilinguals; and, c) Spanish L1 and Kukama as heritage language. Sociolinguistic interviews with 14 participants produced a total of 1 416 instances of demonstratives, which were coded for linguistic and extralinguistic variables. A quantitative analysis shows that gender agreement is sensitive to the demonstrative itself, its syntactic role, the animacy of the anaphora, as well as sociolinguistic profile and the social gender of the participants. To explain these results, we consider the interaction of different factors and the effects of the Kukama substratum on the reorganization of the demonstrative system in Peruvian Amazonian Spanish. These findings contribute to the debate on the role of typological distance between languages in language change driven by contact.Downloads
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