Abstract
Variation among closely related languages may reveal the inner workings of language acquisition, loss and innovation. This study of the existing literature and of selected interviews from recent narrative corpora compares the marking of evidentiality and epistemic modality in Chuquisaca, Bolivian Quechua with its closely related variety in Cuzco, Peru and investigates three hypotheses: that morpho-syntactic attrition proceeds in reverse order of child language acquisition, that convergence characterizes the emergence of grammatical forms different from L1 and L2 in contact situations, and that the Quechua languages are undergoing typological shift toward more isolating morphology. It appears that reportive -sis disappeared first in Bolivia, with eyewitness/validator -min retaining only the validator function. This finding seems to concord with reverse acquisition since it has previously been claimed that epistemic marking is acquired earlier than evidential marking in Cuzco. Meanwhile, Spanish and Quechua in nearby Cochabamba are claimed to mark reportive evidentiality via freestanding verbs of saying. I explore the reportive use of ñiy ‘to say’ in Chuquisaca as compared to Cochabamba and Cuzco and suggest the need for comparative statistical studies of evidential and epistemic marking in Southern Quechua.
Highlights
If we were to find that reportive evidentiality is beginning to be marked via freestanding words rather than suffixes in both Quechua and Spanish, the convergence hypothesis would find support, as has already been claimed for the contact variety of Spanish by Babel (2009), and for both Spanish and Quechua in Cochabamba by Dankel and Soto Rodríguez (2012)
We seem to observe an acceleration of change based on competition with new forms sharing features of both L1 and L2 but unlike traditional versions of either one mentioned by Hintz in his work on typological shift and by Sánchez and others in their work on convergence—all of these forces may account for the abandonment of evidential enclitic -sis in the Cochabamba variety of Quechua and for the more frequent use of the verb of saying ñin to express its semantic and pragmatic features there
The question remains whether there is a more conservative variety of Quechua spoken in Bolivia that retains evidential enclitics; this should be addressed through examination of a comparative sample of speech from Cuzco and Chuquisaca, preferably one which includes instances of reported and quoted speech, narration of stories and personal experiences
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. If we were to find that reportive evidentiality is beginning to be marked via freestanding words rather than suffixes in both Quechua (a language that traditionally marks this distinction through agglutinating morphology) and Spanish (a language that traditionally only marks evidentiality lexically or clausally), the convergence hypothesis would find support, as has already been claimed for the contact variety of Spanish by Babel (2009), and for both Spanish and Quechua in Cochabamba by Dankel and Soto Rodríguez (2012). Since I am not aware of any studies of these phenomena specific to Bolivian Quechua, I will complement the literature search with a qualitative case study of evidential marking in one of the most conservative varieties spoken in Bolivia and compare it to the language of Peruvian (Cuzco Quechua) speakers with relatively matched characteristics.
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