Quechua to Spanish Cross-Linguistic Influence Among Cuzco Quechua-Spanish Bilinguals: The Case of Epistemology

Throughout the course of this dissertation, I respond to three related research goals. In order to investigate these goals, I gathered data from 169 members of two Cuzco, Peru non-profit governmental agencies, the Asociación Civil 'Gregorio Condori Mamani' Proyecto Casa del Cargador, 'Gregorio Condori Mamani' Civil Association House of the Carrier Project' and El Centro de Apoyo Integral a la Trabajadora del Hogar, 'Center for the Integral Support of Female Home Workers'. The majority of my participants speaks Quechua natively and acquired Spanish as an L2 during childhood or adolescence. I collected data from these two populations through the means of ethnography, demographic questionnaires, a social network analysis, a language attitudes study, elicitation of short narratives, role play interviews and a subjective reaction test. In response to my first research goal, I examine the nature of the semantics and pragmatics of the Cuzco Quechua epistemic system, including the epistemic suffixes, -mi/-n and -si/-s, and the Quechua verb past tenses, -rqa- and -sqa-. I find the Quechua epistemics to encode meaning beyond information source and level of certainty and to be affected by a variety of discourse factors. In my treatment of my second research goal, I find 31 different phonetic, morphosyntactic, and calque Quechua to Spanish cross-linguistic influence features to occur in my participants' speech. I also examine the specific case of the cross-linguistic influence of the Quechua epistemic system on the Spanish spoken by my participants. The presence of cross-linguistic influence in my participants' speech supports a model of child SLA in which the L1 plays a significant role in the acquisition of the L2. Finally, in response to my third research goal, I find various demographic characteristics, social network characteristics, and the language attitudes of my participants to correlate with their production of the 31 Quechua to Spanish phonetic, morphosyntactic, and calque cross-linguistic features. While presenting my results for my third research goal, I suggest that my participants may purposefully use various Quechua cross-linguistic features in order to identify themselves as Quechua speakers and distinguish themselves from native Spanish speakers, thereby creating an in-group variety of Spanish