Doctoral Dissertation Research: Cusco Quechua Impulsatives

University Of Delaware, Newark DE

Investigators

Abstract

The Quechua languages have a construction that is known in the literature as a desiderative; however, it has different properties from typical desideratives found in other languages. For example, in contrast to typical desideratives, the subject of Quechua desideratives is non-volitional and marked with an oblique case, instead of the nominative case that characterizes subjects generally. In addition, the verb does not agree with the subject, as it normally would in desideratives. Because of these differences, this research proposes that the Quechua desiderative is not a desiderative at all, but a previously unrecognized linguistic category, called an "impulsative". This construction shares properties with constructions in other languages, specifically Albanian, South Slavic, and Finnish, which have subjects that lack volition, have oblique case-marking, and do not trigger agreement on the verb. There is one striking difference, however. These languages lack dedicated verbal morphology that indicates the impulsative meaning. The hypothesis of this dissertation research is that the impulsative morpheme in Quechua is an overt instantiation of a covert impulsative element in Albanian, South Slavic, and Finnish. In order to test this hypothesis, the PhD student will make two trips to Cusco, Peru to conduct fieldwork with native speakers of Cusco Quechua. She will collect data and will compare the Quechua impulsative with the impulsatives in the other languages. The goal is to determine whether or not impulsatives should be recognized as a new linguistic category. The study will benefit both Quechua speakers and the linguistic community. This project will help document Quechua and will employ Quechua speakers in using their native language. The domains of usage of Quechua are limited and Spanish is becoming increasingly dominant in countries where Quechua is spoken. Furthermore, this study will bring Quechua data to a linguistic audience. The Quechua languages are underrepresented in the syntactic literature, where the focus has primarily been on European languages.