This is a variationist study on subject position in Spanish monolinguals and Spanish-Quechua bilinguals in Huancayo, Peru. Such a variable is ideal to examine the universal predictions of the Interface Hypothesis (IH), since it involves two interfaces constraining subject position choice in Spanish: the syntactic-semantic one (internal) and the syntactic-pragmatic one (external). The IH predicts that the acquisition of features at internal interfaces should bear no difficulty for bilinguals, in contrast with the acquisition of features at external interfaces. Multiple regression analyses reveal that the differences found go along the lines of the universal predictions of the IH: the unaccusativity of the subjects’ verbs (internal interface) is a strong predictor of the VS order for the bilinguals, whereas focus (external interface) does not constrain said variant. Nonetheless, some Quechua properties appear as an alternative explanation, rather peculiar to the contact situation studied, to the contrast found between the two speaker groups.
Cerrón-Palomino, Álvaro. (2017). Quechua Reflexes in a Contact Variety? Grammatical Subject Position in Andean Spanish. Boletín De Filología, 52(1), pp. 47–77. Retrieved from https://revistas.uchile.cl/index.php/BDF/article/view/47544
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