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

• Final Report Year: 2023

Final Report Abstract

The project has collected, transcribed, translated, morphologically glossed and published open access pragmatically and metrically controlled data in three multilingual communities in South America. The three Amerindian languages Quechua, Guaraní and Nheengatu were important instruments of the Latin American colonial societies and are still spoken today in many communities together with the dominant languages Spanish and Portuguese. The linguistic focus was initially on prosodic contact processes in the languages involved, but in the further course of the project, other expressive domains of pragmatic meanings were and are also taken into account. A total of 87 informants were recorded in various communicative games. So far, the project has been able to develop empirically based analyses of the prosodic system, especially for the Quechua of Conchucos. First of all, we found an accentuation pattern that is quite different from what the literature had previously suggested for other Quechua varieties and also for the dialect we studied. We could not find lexical stress, rather phonological phrases are tonally marked at their boundaries, while length occurs freely and distinctively in the phonological word. Pitch movements in non-phrase-peripheral positions in Quechua correspond to a Spanish accentuation pattern; conversely, phrase-prominent realisations which we attribute to a more Quechuan origin, are evident in the Spanish of the same speakers as well. One of the two dissertations broke new theoretical ground by showing that phonological phrases are constructed recursively in this dialect. The other dissertation clarified the focuscreating functions of some suffixes within the framework of a discourse semantic analysis and was able to correct older views on this. The Guaraní data have not yet been theorised, but will be systematically compared with the Nheengatu data in the coming years. Both languages belong to the Tupi-Guaraní branch of the Tupi language family and both languages have developed in close contact with Spanish and Portuguese respectively over the past 500 years, which makes comparative studies theoretically interesting. In our project, Nheengatu has been given a publicly accessible database for the first time. Our close cooperation with indigenous communities on the Rio Negro is to be continued in the future and will result in a participatory project that places the connection between evidentiality, modality and information structure on the horizon of the methodology to be developed together with these communities.

Publications

• Presupposed modality. Studies in Language Companion Series, 203-228.
  Reich, Uli
  
• The realizational coefficient: Devising a method for empirically determining prominent positions in Conchucos Quechua. In Ingo Feldhausen, Jan Fliessbach & Maria d. M. Vanrell (eds.), Methods in prosody: A Romance language perspective (Studies in Laboratory Phonology 6), 123–164. Berlin: Language Science Press.
  Buchholz, Timo & Uli Reich
  
• Corpora amerikanischer Sprachen: Interaktive Sprachspiele aus dem mehrsprachigen Lateinamerika (Huari Spanisch). Berlin: Freie Universität
  Bendezú Araujo; Raúl, Timo Buchholz & Uli Reich
  
• Corpora amerikanischer Sprachen: Interaktive Sprachspiele aus dem mehrsprachigen Lateinamerika (Quechua). Berlin: Freie Universität
  Bendezú Araujo; Raúl, Timo Buchholz & Uli Reich
  
• 15 The phonology of Romance contact varieties. Manual of Romance Phonetics and Phonology, 462-502.
  Gabriel, Christoph & Reich, Uli
  
• Identificación y aserción en la marcación de foco del quechua de Conchucos (Áncash, Perú): Freie Universität Berlin
  Bendezú Araujo, Raúl I.
  
• Corpora amerikanischer Sprachen: Interaktive Sprachspiele aus dem mehrsprachigen Lateinamerika (Guaraní). Berlin: Freie Universität
  Reich, Uli; Élodie Blestel & Hedy Penner
  
• Corpora amerikanischer Sprachen: Interaktive Sprachspiele aus dem mehrsprachigen Lateinamerika (Nheengatú). Berlin: Freie Universität
  Reich, Uli & Antônio Lessa
  
• Corpora amerikanischer Sprachen: Interaktive Sprachspiele aus dem mehrsprachigen Lateinamerika (Portugiesisch aus São Gabriel da Cachoeira). Berlin: Freie Universität
  Reich, Uli & Antônio Lessa
  
• Corpora amerikanischer Sprachen: Interaktive Sprachspiele aus dem mehrsprachigen Lateinamerika (Spanisch aus Asunción)
  Reich, Uli; Élodie Blestel & Hedy Penner
  
• Intonation between phrasing and accent.
  Buchholz, Timo
  
• Systemic consistency across named languages in the Andes. From Formal Linguistic Theory to the Art of Historical Editions, 319-332.
  Reich, Uli