Language contact between Spanish and Mosetén: A study of grammatical integration

Abstract

Mosetén (Mosetenan) is spoken by approximately 800 people in the foothills of the Bolivian Andes. All of the speakers are bilingual in Spanish and Mosetén. Spanish is highly dominant and as expected, Mosetén has borrowed many structures from this language. I focus on Spanish grammatical markers that are integrated into the Mosetén system. These elements include coordinating and subordinating conjunctions, discourse markers, certain prepositions as well as markers expressing delimitation. Most of the elements are similar to gestures and function above the level of the proposition. They can be used together with native markers that express similar notions and in some cases have different functions from their equivalents in Spanish. I will show that the contact phenomena in Mosetén are typical for languages in similar situations. This similarity can be explained by the processes that appear at the very onset of borrowing in addition to comparable circumstances during the integration into the system of the language. © 2007, SAGE Publications. All rights reserved