Person marking in Quechua — A constraint-based minimalist analysis

Abstract

Abstract Quechua, which is spoken from the southern parts of Colombia to the northern parts of Chile and Argentina, exhibits a rich verbal morphology. The various dialects of Quechua can be ranked in terms of developmental stages, according to the way in which the inflectional system is organized. Some Peruvian dialects (such as those of Ancash and Ayacucho, belonging to different dialect groups) exhibit remarkable asymmetries in the marking of objects : 1st person objects are marked transparently with separate object and subject affixes, whereas the marking of 2nd person objects is somewhat opaque. We account for this asymmetry by the assumption that the person hierarchy in Quechua is 1 ⪢ 2 ⪢ 3 and that the marking of objects is constrained by the Object-Subject-Constraint (OSC). ‘The object may be marked separately from the subject only if it refers to a person that is higher on the hierarchy of person than the person to which the subject refers’. We will then show that the dialect of Cuzco (Peru) has lost any independent morpheme for 2nd person objects, hence, OSC has become irrelevant. It is this stage that allows reanalysis: the most recent dialects such as those of Potosi (Bolivia) and Santiago del Estero (Argentina) have reinvented a 2nd person object morpheme and have given up OSC; in these dialects a symmetric system of object marking has evolved. We will discuss our findings in terms of two possible types of inflectional systems: one type has a small set of morphemes but additional constraints that restrict the actual combinations of morphemes — and so induce asymmetries, whereas the other type has a greater and more finely differentiated set of morphemes but does not need additional constraints — and so allows more transparency and symmetry in the system. We will also show how the development of the Quechua person system is intermingled with that of the number system. Only if the plural suffix follows the person affixes, as happens in the Quechua II dialects, can plural allomorphs arise that are sensitive to person or that fuse plural and person into one single morpheme, facts that have considerable consequences for the whole system.