Duplication in the L2 Spanish Produced by Quechua-Speaking Children: Transfer of a Pragmatic Strategy

Abstract

Quechua and Spanish, languages long in contact throughout the Andes, are particularly interesting partners in bilingual speech because the word order patterns of Quechua exactly mirror those of Spanish: while Quechua is uniformly leftbranching for all maximal projections, Spanish is generally right-branching.1 Hence, the canonical ordering of major constituents in Quechua is SOV, whereas, in Spanish, the basic surface order is SVO. The L2 Spanish produced by Quechua-speaking children in Peru has yielded intriguing observations of interlanguage phenomena, with corresponding speculation concerning early syntactic development in the second language. In work exploring the development of Spanish word order in young native speakers of Quechua (Minaya and Lujan 1982; Lujan, Minaya, and Sankoff 1984), for example, it was reported that children frequently produced "hybrid" (S)VOV structures. To account for these odd constructions, Minaya and Lujan proposed that the children had a transitional grammar with a nonadult phrase structure rule: VP » VP V. They further maintained, in support of this proposal, that the pattern was idiosyncratic of the children's interlanguage, since it could not be derived from either of the participating languages, Quechua and Spanish. This study presents a vigorous challenge to these claims. First, the reduplicative pattern is very much alive in the Quechua spoken by both adults and children, who duplicate, presumably for emphatic effect, not only verbs but also subjects, objects, adjunct expressions, negative forms even entire phrases. It will thus be shown that the appearance of the VOV pattern in child L2 Spanish clearly represents transfer of a discourse-pragmatic strategy and not a transitional, nonadult, hybrid grammar.2