Convergence and divergence in Ibero-Romance across contact situations and beyond

Miriam Bouzouita, Renata Enghels, Clara Vanderschueren, Miriam Bouzouita, Renata Enghels, Clara Vanderschueren

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9783110736311
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Spanish Language
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book aims to provide a better understanding of convergence and non-convergence phenomena, such as divergence, from different theoretical perspectives. It brings together nine case studies that deal with contact between languages found in the Iberian Peninsula (Castilian, Catalan, Portuguese and Basque), between Spanish or Portuguese and another language (such as English), and between different varieties from Europe and other continents. The volume thus unites views from two fields that rarely interact: contact linguistics and dialectology. It discusses the mechanisms and consequences of language contact within the Ibero-Romance world, a geographical space characterised by a high rate of multilingual speakers and settings. The contributions deal with various combinations of convergence and divergence, for example between different varieties of the same language, language stability despite contact, as well as less studied aspects, such as the relation between language contact and second language acquisition, the linguistic landscape perspective of language contact, and divergence in linguistic identity construction.

Part 1: Convergence and divergence in contact situations in the Iberian Peninsula

Gender loss in accusative clitics in Basque Spanish

A contact-induced convergence phenomenon

Bruno Camus Bergareche

Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha

Sara Gómez Seibane

Universidad de La Rioja

Note: This research is part of the project “COREC: Corpus Oral de Referencia del Español en Contacto. Fase I: Lenguas Minoritarias” headed by Azucena Palacios (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid) and Sara Gómez Seibane (Universidad de La Rioja), funded by the Spanish Ministry for Science and Innovation (Ref. PID2019-105865GB-I00). A previous version of this paper was presented at the International Conference on Linguistics of Ibero-Romance Languages: Ibero-Romance in Contact and in Contrast, Ghent University, December 14–16, 2015. We would like to thank those present for their comments and suggestions, which were helpful in improving this study. We also want to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their comments. Any errors are solely ours.

Abstract

This paper describes the use of feminine leísmo for the variety of Spanish spoken in the Basque Country, i.e., the use of the unstressed dative pronoun le to refer to feminine direct objects. After reviewing its presence in historical texts, as well as its synchronic geographical and social distribution, we link leísmo in Basque Spanish with some grammatical characteristics of the other language spoken in this area, namely Basque. Taking this contact situation as our starting point, we put forward different arguments to corroborate our theory, including the existence of similar phenomena in other Spanish varieties in contact with languages whose pronominal systems are partly akin to those of the Basque language. Lastly, we will explain the phenomenon of feminine leísmo in Basque Spanish by assuming the models of contact-induced change and convergence developed by Palacios (2005) for cases in which gender has been eliminated in clitics in Latin American Spanish. In this way, we hope to contribute to a better understanding of little-known processes of grammatical convergence in Spanish in situations of contact with other languages.

Keywords: Basque Spanish, convergence, language contact, clitics, dative and accusative pronouns, gender loss,

1 Introduction

The use of dative clitics le and les to refer the feminine direct object – as well as masculine ones, which constitutes the phenomenon known as leísmo, common throughout the whole of northern Spain – is widely documented in the Spanish variety spoken in the Autonomous Community of the Basque Country (onwards Basque Country) and in neighboring areas where we know that Basque was still spoken in the 18th century, such as the northern half of Navarre (Gómez Seibane 2012a; Camus/Gómez Seibane 2015b). This so-called feminine leísmo has been commonly accounted for as being one of the effects of contact between the two languages present in the region, Basque and Spanish (Fernández-Ordóñez 1999). In (1) we give an example of this phenomenon.¹

(1)

La chica_i llegó a tal hora a su casa y el cura le_i vio (COSER, Aulesti, Bizkaia).

‘The girl arrived home at such a time and the priest saw her-dat (direct object) from his house’.

This paper is structured as follows: first we present the data and methodology that were used (section 2); Section 3 outlines the parameters on which the clitics in the Spanish spoken in northern Spain are based. Focusing on Spanish leísmo found in the Basque Country, section 4 describes its presence in historical texts and outlines its geographical, social, syntactic and semantic distribution. In section 5, we relate leísmo in Basque Spanish to the grammatical characteristics of Basque, the other language spoken in this area, taking into account its conditions of use and its syntactic distribution. We also offer examples of similar phenomena that occur relatively commonly in other Spanish contact varieties whose pronominal systems are partly akin to those of the Basque language. Using the previous, section 5 offers an explanation of feminine leísmo found in the Basque Country, based on the models of contact-induced change and convergence developed by Palacios (2005) for cases in which gender is lost in clitics in Latin American Spanish. More generally, we hope to contribute to a better awareness of grammatical convergence processes in contexts of language contact and, in particular, to draw attention to the interest of studies on lesser known Spanish varieties in contact with other languages.

2 Data and methodology

For a comprehensive description of leísmo found in the Basque Country, we used data gathered from various sources, as outlined below.

1. Linguistic corpora: oral data gathered from different corpora.
   • The open-access COSER corpus (Corpus Oral y Sonoro del Español Rural; ‘Audible Corpus of Spoken Rural Spanish’), based on uneducated informants over the age of 60 from rural areas of Spain (Fernández-Ordóñez 2005–present). The interviews that have been included in this work were recorded in 2000 in Bizkaia, Gipuzkoa and Araba, the three provinces of the Basque Country.
   • An oral sample of ten bilingual speakers, with different degrees of proficiency in the Basque language, aged between 25 and 50, born and living in semi-urban areas of the Basque Country in x. This corpus contains semi-structured informal interviews conducted at informants’ home. It has been also used for other contact studies (Gómez Seibane 2012b; 2012c). We will refer to this corpus as the Corpus of the Basque Country (CoBasCo).
2. Linguistic atlas: Oral data with leísmo found in rural areas adjacent to the Basque Country proceeding from the Atlas Lingüístico y Etnográfico de Aragón, Navarra y La Rioja (ALEANR; Alvar et al. 1979–1983).
3. A questionnaire on the acceptability of leísmo: it was conducted among twenty educated Basque Spanish-sp...