Aims and objectives: This study aims to explore language attitudes among speakers of Shipibo, an Amazonian indigenous language from the Panoan family, in the community of Cantagallo in the city of Lima, an urban, Spanish-dominant environment. The study is motivated by the paucity of studies on language attitudes in urban indigenous communities. The Cantagallo Shipibo community was settled in the early 2000s and temporarily relocated in 2017. Methodology: Interviews were conducted based on questionnaires with two groups of participants in 2002 and 2017, 60 in total, focusing on their attitudes toward Shipibo and Spanish. Some of the participants answered the questionnaires both times, others answered only once. Responses were analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. Open-ended responses were classified into similar categories and tallied. Findings: Participants showed positive attitudes toward Shipibo-Konibo in 2002 and 2017, and strong identification with it, but language shift toward Spanish is now taking place, especially among the second generation. This development has triggered perceived changes in the performance aspects of linguistic identity. Furthermore, while in 2002 attitudes toward Spanish were mostly positive, in 2017 some negative attitudes toward the majority language emerged along with the perception of discrimination against the Shipibo-Konibo. Originality: The study’s originality rests on tracing the evolution of this community’s perspectives on language use from shortly after its arrival in Cantagallo, Lima, to its final relocation. Furthermore, few other studies have engaged this Shipibo community in Lima regarding language attitudes. Significance: The project highlights the importance of different factors in the successful language maintenance in this context. Specifically, although speakers still have positive attitudes toward Shipibo, they also see increasing advantages to speaking Spanish, a clear case of utility-maximization. Limitations: Although the study provides important insights, its methodology (a questionnaire/interview) gives a partial view of the language attitudes and maintenance in this community.

It has been widely argued that morphological competence, particularly functional morphology, represents the bottleneck of second language acquisition (Jensen et al. 2017;Lardiere 1998Lardiere , 2005Slabakova 2008Slabakova , 2009Slabakova , 2013. In this study, we explore three challenging aspects of the morphology of Spanish among advanced L1 Ashaninka-L2 Spanish speakers: (i) the acquisition of proclitics and enclitics with inflected verbs; (ii) the distribution of accusative clitics according to the thematic role of the direct object in anaphoric and doubling structures; and (iii) the distribution of clitic forms and their association with gender features. Our results show evidence of the L2 acquisition of clitic structures in L2 Spanish speakers, and no difference between native and L2 speakers regarding sensitivity to thematic roles. However, there are statistically significant differences between groups in the distribution of the gender specification of the clitic antecedents or doubled determiner phrases (DPs). We take these results as evidence in support of the view that morphological patterns can be acquired (proclitics vs. suffixes) as well as preferences for mapping thematic roles onto clitics, but subtle differences in the continuum of preferences for mapping gender features are more difficult to acquire.

Direct object clitics in Spanish are morphological markers at the interfaces of syntax, phonology, morphology, and information structure (Zwicky, 1985; Ordóñez & Repetti, 2006; Belloro, 2007; Spencer & Luís, 2012). They play an important part in argument morphology in Spanish and are subject to variability in bilingual acquisition (McCarthy, 2008). In this paper we explore the morphology-syntax-information structure mapping of direct object clitics in clitic structures in a range of speakers that includes Quechua-dominant bilinguals and Spanish monolingual individuals along a continuum of language contact situations. Our findings indicate clear dissociation between syntactic properties and marking of morphological features. They also indicate a progression from default gender marking in clitics to a scalar system of clitic forms based on animacy and informational value along the continuum of speakers. Finally, while clitics in liberal clitic doubling varieties receive a focus interpretation (Sánchez, 2010; Sánchez & Zdrojewski, 2013), our data indicate that in some Spanish contact varieties they denote the primary object and secondary topic (Sánchez, 2003; Dalrymple & Nikolaeva, 2011; Mayer, 2008, 2013, forthcoming). The findings of this exploratory study support the view that while clitics exhibit common syntactic properties across a continuum of speakers, they may vary in morphological marking and informational value.

https://scholarship.libraries.rutgers.edu/esploro/outputs/acceptedManuscript/Feature-variability-in-the-bilingual-monolingual-continuum/991031550 014504646/filesAndLinks?index=0

The workshop brought together specialists from both sides of the Pacific working on a variety of topics within Romance Linguistics, ranging from phonological analysis to syntax and discourse. The rationale behind this workshop was to celebrate the establishment of a research group in the field at the School of Language Studies at the ANU, in particular Hispanic Linguistics. This special edition marks the launch of the Romance Linguistics in the Antipodes (RomLA) virtual research centre, which aims to provide a platform for researchers in Australia and New Zealand, and to facilitate collaborations and networking with colleagues outside of Oceania. The papers are organised in alphabetical order, which coincidentally allows us to organise the papers according to theoretical frameworks and/or topics. In the first paper, Delicado Cantero addresses clausal substantivization in Spanish. After introducing a formal syntactic account of finite clauses and clausal nominalization in Spanish, a language where a DP may optionally top a CP in certain contexts, the author concentrates on two main issues. The first is the unexpected constraint barring the combination of prepositions and clauses introduced by determiners. While DPs make typical prepositional complements, in Spanish results in ungrammaticality if selected by a preposition. Building on the weak nature of the Spanish complementizer que and on interpolation tests, the author argues for the application of strict adjacency between P and C, thus blocking a potential DP projection. The author goes on to argue against the need of the determiner layer-a DP-in creating a nominal (finite) clause, and supports a differentiation between the nominality of the (finite) clause and the projection of an additional DP, labelled clausal substantivization.