Presented as part of the Linguistics, Languages & Cultures Seminar Series

In this talk, I will focus on some of the major findings and contributions that the study of bilingualism in Spanish and agglutinative languages such as Quechua and mixed null subject languages such as Shipibo has brought to the field. These findings support a more nuanced view of modularity and interactions across components (Slaba­kova 2008).  These contributions include evidence of crosslinguistic influence in the Spanish of Quechua and Shipibo speakers: (a)  at the core syntax in the pro­jec­tion of  non-argumental clitics (Camacho, Sánchez and Paredes, 1995; Escobar, 1991; Kalt, 2000, 2002, Kalt 2012b; Mayer 2010; Sánchez 2003) (b) at the lexico-morphosyntactic interface in the mapping of functional features onto overt mor­phemes or independent words depending on the morphological paradigm of each language type (Sánchez, 2004; Kalt, 2009); and (c) at the syntax/pragmatics interface in the interaction between syntactic position, morphological marking and the interpretation of functional features such as topic and focus (Camacho, Paredes and Sánchez, 1997; Muntendam, 2013, Sanchez, Camacho and Elías 2010).

Liliana Sánchez is Professor and Chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Rutgers University. Her research interests are bilingual and comparative syntax (Spanish-English, Spanish-Quechua). She is also interested in language assessment in minority populations.