Time and reminiscence in contact

Abstract

The question of how and why change occurs is a persistent theme in research on language contact and sociolinguistics. In this article, I investigate the role of social context in producing change and maintenance in a contact variety of Andean Spanish. Two generations of speakers in a Quechua-Spanish contact zone in central Bolivia interpret stress shift on the first person imperfect past tense as a marker of the “reminiscent past.” An emergent but unstable grammatical distinction is entwined with lived experience and speakers’ positioning as social actors. Both stability and change are produced by speakers through practice and are closely related to the iconization of contact features as symbols of social orientation and experience.