Clitics in language contact

ABSTRACT

This commentary focuses on clitics in Spanish and discusses two recent studies that report on clitics in language contact situations: Mayer and Sánchez (2019) on clitics in bilingual Quechua-Spanish and bilingual Shipibo-Spanish varieties, and Jiménez-Gaspar, Pires, and Guijarro-Fuentes (2020) on clitics in Catalan and Spanish in contact. We briefly discuss the properties of clitics in Spanish, followed by their role in language variation and contact (i.e. language contact, heritage Spanish, and second language learning). We then comment on the two papers on clitics in language contact, which show how the outcomes of language contact vary across language pairings and contact situations.

KEYWORDS:

• clitics
• Spanish
• language variation
• language contact
• heritage Spanish
• second language learning

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The following abbreviations are used in the glosses: acc = accusative; dat = dative; do = direct object; f = feminine; ger = gerund; inf = infinitive; io = indirect object; m = masculine; pl = plural; pp = past participle; pro = pronoun; pst = past tense; refl = reflexive; sg = singular; subj = subjunctive; 1 = first person; 2 = second person; 3 = third person.

1 Perlmutter uses Roman numerals to refer to first, second, and third person clitics. Heap (2008) shows that in actual dialectal spoken Spanish there are numerous specific deviations from Perlmutter’s generalization, but all authors would agree that the order of the clitics is far from free, and motivated by the phi-features of the pronouns involved.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Antje Muntendam

Antje Muntendam is an Associate Professor of Spanish and Linguistics at Florida State University. Her research focuses on the linguistic outcomes of bilingualism and language contact, both in production and in comprehension. She has worked on several language pairs, including Quechua and Spanish in Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru, and Turkish and Dutch in the Netherlands.

Pieter Muysken

Pieter Muysken is emeritus professor of Linguistics at Radboud University Nijmegen. His research focuses on the ways human languages interact, and the contact-induced language change that results from this interaction. Muysken developed different formal models of language to study these processes of contact. He has done fieldwork in the Andes, the Caribbean, as well as with bilingual groups in the Netherlands.