Mittwoch, 15.00 Uhr
Quechua is spoken from the southern parts of Colombia to the northern parts of Chile and Argentina. Two main groups, Quechua I and Quechua II, can be distinguished on both phonological and morphological grounds. All Quechua dialects dispose of a rich verbal morphology.
In this talk, I will present an analysis of the person marking system in Quechua dialects, including object and subject person and the relation between them. Some dialects exhibit remarkable asymmetries in the marking of objects, whereas others do not. The asymmetries that we will discuss are illustrated in (1) with examples from Ancash, a Quechua I dialect spoken in central Peru. (la,b) show that the marking of 1st person objects is transparent: the object suffix ma is followed by suffixes for 2subject or 3subject. In contrast, the markings of 2nd person objects shows a fused subject/object morpheme in (lc) and no mention of the subject in (ld); here, the general person morpheme nki for 2nd person specifies the object rather than the subject, as it does in (la).
| (1) | 1object | 2object | ||
| a. rika-man-ki | 'you see me' | c. rika-q | 'I see you' | |
| see-1obj-2 | see 1/2 | |||
| b. rika-ma-n | 'he/she sees me' | d. rika-shu-nki ' | he/she sees you' | |
| see-1obj-3 | see-obj-2 |
We account for this asymmetry by the assumption that the person hierarchy in Quechua is 1 > 2 > 3 and that the marking of objects is constrained by the Object-Subject-Constraint (OSC):
(2) OSC: The object may be separately marked from the subject only if it refers to a person that is higher on the hierarchy of person than the person to which the subject refers.
Furthermore, I will show that the various dialects of Quechua can be ranked in terms of developmental stages, according to the way in which the inflectional system is organized. The dialect of Ayacucho, which belongs to the Quechua II-group (which has a different position for number than Quechua I), is similar to that of Ancash in terms of object marking and OSC is an active constraint in this dialect as well. The dialect of Cuzco has fused subject/ object suffixes in all instances of 2nd person objects and has no independent morpheme for 20bject, hence, OSC has become unnecessary. It is this stage that allows reanalysis: the most recent dialects like those of Potosi (Bolivia) and Santiago del Estero (Argentina) have reinvented a 20bject morpheme and have given up OSC, in these dialects a symmetric system of object marking has evolved.
I will discuss these findings in terms of two possible types of inflectional systems: One type has a small set of morphemes but additional constraints that constrain the actual combinations of morphemes - and so induce asymmetries -, whereas the other type has a greater and more finely differentiated set of morphemes but does not need additional constraints - and so allows more transparency and symmetry in the system.
Finally, I will discuss how the development of the Quechua person system is intermingled with that of the number system. The plural suffix precedes all person affixes in Quechua I dialects, while it follows the person affixes in Quechua II dialects. The latter allow the emergence of plural allomorphs that either are sensitive to person or fuse plural and person into a single morpheme. I will show that these facts have considerable consequences on the whole system.
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