Bilingual Prosody: Metrics, Rhytm and Intonation between Spanish and Quechua

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Uli Reich
• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics ; General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: from 2015 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 274614727

In its continuation, the project aims at surpassing the current horizon of prosodic language contact in a twofold manner. On the one hand, not just the prosody of Conchucos Quechua spoken in Ancash/Peru is now to be described on an empirical basis, but a comprehensive grammar of this underdescribed and understudied but important dialect of central Quechua is to be composed. On the other hand, the method of data elicitation established in the current project is to be expanded in cooperation with locally very well connected colleagues to other regions of linguistic interest where there is a situation of language contact between Amerindian languages and Spanish. The aim here is to produce linguistic corpora that make pragmatically and phonologically controlled and morphologically glossed recordings of high acoustic quality of these languages available to the general linguistic community. For the former part, the grammatical description of Conchucos Quechua, we will be able to make use of the empirical data gathered during the first project as well as the introspective competence of Leonel Menacho López, our partner in Huaraz/Ancash, who will develop and author the grammar jointly together with the PI and one of the scientific collaborators. For the latter part, the generation of Amerindian-Spanish contact corpora, we will be able to rely on a very well established network of collaboration with French, Chilean and Mexican partners that have all been working on regions of language contact between Spanish and Amerindian languages, namely Mapudungun in Chile, Guaraní in Paraguay and Yucatec Maya in Mexico. The corpus data gathered in the project will be transcribed morphologically, provided with metadata in English, Spanish and Portuguese and made available in a generally accessible online repositorium.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Chile, France
• Cooperation Partners: Professorin Dr. Elodie Blestel; Professorin Dr. Magaly Ruiz Mella