Feature selection in clitic expression in two bilingual Amazonian Spanish varieties

Abstract

We study variability in the distribution of third person accusative clitics and gender neutralization in direct object clitic doubling, and in anaphoric expressions in the narratives of two groups of speakers of Amazonian bilingual Spanish varieties. The two groups are in contact with two typologically different and geographically distant Amazonian languages, Shipibo and Ashaninka. We argue that the scalar systems of Spanish clitics found in both groups, characterized by low frequency of gender marking, are due to access to a reduced subset of features in the sense of Mufwene (2001, 2002), where competition and selection of features depend on the language ecological factors such as social networks, input, and stage of language acquisition. Show more