The Research Unit for Language Acquisition and Pedagogy is pleased to announce a seminar held in celebration of Jonathan Mastai Husum’s PhD defense the previous day. The seminar takes place on Friday 21 November at 13.00 – 15.30 in building 1481-366, Nobelparken. Everyone is welcome!

Program

13.00 – 13.10 – Welcome and presentation of participants

13.10 – 13.50 – Prof. Eeva Sippola, University of Helsinki

Plural nouns in contact

In Chabacano, a Creole language from the Philippines, certain words from the lexifier language Spanish have been adopted in their plural-derived form, although their number is singular. These invariable plural forms can also be found in Philippine languages as Spanish loanwords, without the plural marker that is common for these languages. This presentation offers a detailed analysis of the invariable plural words in Chabacano. The results are used to evaluate theories about the development of the invariable plurals and to explain the commonalities between their use in Chabacano and the Philippine languages. In addition, similar uses are shown to occur in present-day contact situations with English in the Philippines. In general, the results show a continuity in the adoption and semantics of the plurals between the substrate and the varieties of Chabacano, adding to the substratist explanations in language contact and to the discussion about the origins of the Chabacano varieties.

13.50 – 14.30 – Prof. Joachim Steffen, Augsburg University

Spanish plural marking in Guarani texts of the colonial period

The presentation analyzes Spanish nominal loanwords in Guarani letters written between 1752 and 1831 in the Jesuit reductions of Paraguay. The focus is on the variation between zero-marked and -s-marked plurals and on how these forms interact with Guarani and Spanish determiners and numeral systems. The quantitative results are used to trace historical shifts in plural marking and to evaluate how social and cultural changes under colonial rule influenced linguistic structure. The analysis suggests that indigenous writers adopted the Spanish plural selectively, reflecting new ways of conceptualizing quantity and enumeration introduced through colonial administration, economy, and religion. These findings shed light on processes of language convergence between Guarani and Spanish and contribute to the historical understanding of plural marking in present-day Paraguayan Spanish.

14.30 – 14.40 – Coffee break

14.40 – 15.20 – Assoc. Prof. Peter Bakker, Aarhus University (with Mikael Parkvall)

An unknown Spanish pidgin of the Argentinian frontier: Ranquel Pidgin Spanish In the spring of 1870, the Argentinian colonel Lucio Victorio Mansilla (1831-1913), was sent out to reconnoiter an area of Argentina that was then dominated by the Ranquel (or Rankülche) indigenous population, speakers of a variety of Mapudungun. He did that with the assistance of a small army on horseback, ultimately in order to pave the way for effective Argentinian control, land appropriation and organised settlement in the area. While his incursion reached about 300 km into Ranquel lands, it lasted for a mere three weeks in the spring of 1870. He did, however, produce a detailed account of it in 68 short chapters that were originally published as daily instalments in the Buenos Aires newspaper La Tribuna. Soon afterwards this was compiled into a book, called Una excursión a los indios ranqueles. His account contains around 80 examples of a language variety which we call Ranquel Pidgin Spanish. It was used in contact between speakers of Spanish and Mapudungun (or Mapuche). Previously untapped by contact linguists, the source is fairly rich in data, which we here exploit to provide a description of the pidgin. As other pidgins, it has no inflection of any kind, and the default form of the verb is the gerund. Syntactically it is closer to Spanish than to Mapudungun. In our presentation, we will discuss the properties of the pidgin, and the context in which it was used.

15.20 – 15.30 – Closing remarks and farewell

Organizer: Susana S. Fernández