The Acquisition of Clitic Pronouns in the Spanish Interlanguage of Peruvian Quechua Speakers

Abstract

Studies of the second language acquisition of children in an immersion environment in which they have little contact with native speakers other than the teacher have shown that they tend to acquire a classroom dialect containing many interlanguage forms which reflect their peers' interlanguage rather than their native-speaking teacher's model (Plann, 1976). However, little research has been conducted on the natural language acquisition of a marginalized group which acquires a second language in an environment in which contact with native speakers is generally limited for social and economic reasons. Previous evidence from research on the acquisition of Spanish by Quechua speakers (Cerr6n-Palomino, 1976; Lozano, 1975; Lujin, Minaya, and Sankoff, 1981; Menges, 1980; Muysken, 1984; Puente, 1981) would seem to indicate that their Spanish vernacular has also incorporated interlanguage features to some extent, because of sociolinguistic constraints which affect their acquisition of Spanish. One of the characteristics frequently observed in the Spanish of Quechua speakers is the transfer of Object-Verb word order from Quechua and the frequent misuse of clitic pronouns. These particular syntactic and morphological features are interesting in that they allow comparison between the Spanish acquisition of English speakers whose Li is characterized by SVO order and the Spanish acquisition of Quechua speakers whose L1 is characterized by SOV. The purpose of this study then is to analyze the acquisition of clitic pronouns by adult Quechua speakers in Cuzco who have differing degrees of contact with native speakers of Spanish.