396

VII. LATIN-AMERICAN STUDIES LANGUAGE AMERICAN SPANISH

By D. J. GIFFORD, Director of the Centre for Latin-American Linguistic Studies, University of St Andrews

I. LEXICOGRAPHY G. de Granda, 'Lexico de origen uc:1.utico en el espanol del ', RDTP, 34, 1978, I (1980) :233-53, collects and comments upon 140 nautical terms in Paraguayan Spanish. The conditions under which these entered are interesting, inasmuch as powerful merchants in Lima persuaded the Viceroy of Peru to have the port of Buenos Aires closed to all mercantile traffic from 1593 to the end of the 18th century; consequently the influx of Spanish nautical terms as well as the nature of those borrowings was straitjacketed by the extremely limited marine traffic from Buenos Aires up to Asuncion, involving a journey that could take up to four months. J. C. Guarnieri, Diccionario del lenguaje rioplatense, Montevideo, 1979, points out that the ingredients of popular language include gauchesco (rural), (criminal) and coco­ liche (Hispano-Italian), and the words listed reflect this mixture. True however to the Argentine traditional attitude to these dialect forms, G. sees them as a falling-away from the norm and a vice to be conquered; this is unhelpful in the light of modern dialectological theory.

2. PHONOLOGY AND MORPHOSYNTAX S. Poplack, 'Deletion and disambiguation in ', Language, 56:371-85, studies two phonological variables which can by the loss of certain sounds lead to syntactic ambiguity; thus, lsI and Inl lead to zero, with bailaban unas nenas bonitas giving bailaba una nena bonita. Data came from a block of working-class Puerto Ricans in N. Philadelphia. The conclusion is that Puerto Rican Spanish seems to be reorganizing its sytem of plural marking in that it Language: American Spanish 397 has to be marked somewhere in a sentence, particularly by -no M. B. Fontanella de Weinburg, 'Un cambio lingiiistico en marcha: los palatales del espanol bonaerense', Orbis, 27, 1978: 2 15-47, studies /s/ and If/ in Bahia Blanca and the aspects of confusion that exist between them; thus, persons under 30 have a tendency to unvoice /f/ and voice the lsi, so that they exist side by side under changed conditions. G. de Granda, 'Prestamos morfologicos del guarani en el espanol del Paraguay', RLiR, 44:57-68, 247-65, takes J. L. Appleyard's Los mon610gos (Asuncion, 1973), C. V. Marsal's Mancuello y la perdiz (Asuncion, 1969), and A. R. Bastos's El trueno entre las hojas (BA, 1976), and extracts 30 loan words or morphemes which occur, coming to the conclusion that Paraguayan Spanish should be classed as a lengua mixta. In the second part of his article he adds another 138 Guarani words and mor­ phemes, with rather too few examples. One would have been grateful in both sections of the article to have had more precise details as to his primary material. Id., 'Calcos sintacticos del guarani en el espanol del Paraguay', NRFH, 28, 1979: 267-86, studies syntactic influences of Guarani on Spanish. He states that in 1962 48% of Paraguayans were bilingual and 45% monolingual in Guarani, while only 4.4% were monolingual in Spanish. He lists verbal constructions, loss of copula, compara­ tive and negative forms, unusual use of prepositions as examples: thus ya trabaje todo ya, ~qui 10 que te trae tan tarde?, mi prcifesor es argel como el tuyo, no necesito por vos, se muri6 de mi mi perrito. C. Parodi, 'Orden de los pronombres atonos durante el primer cuarto del siglo XV en el espanol novo-hispano', ib., 3 12-I 7, takes a series of texts from Nueva Espana between 1523 and 1526, and shows that the position of the atonic pronoun was dependant on the form of the verb, and not on its position in the sentence as with medieval Spanish. R. Romer, 'Proclisis y enclisis en una lengua tonal: algunas comparaciones entre el papiamentu y el espanol', Dialogos Hispanicos, Univ. of Amsterdam, I, I 13-23, stresses the importance of tone in certain clitic situations (e.g. preposition plus personal pro­ noun), comparing the intensity of these in Papiamentu and in Spanish. L. FlOrez, 'Del espanol hablado en Colombia: muestra de formas nominales en uso', Thesaurus, 34, 1979: I-50, bases its findings mainly on Spanish spoken in Bogota. Prefixes and