Morphological Borrowing in Sierra Popoluca Salomé

CHAPTER TEN MORPHOLOGICAL BORROWING IN SIERRA POPOLUCA Salomé Gutiérrez Morales It is now well known that in situations of intense and extended language contact, a language can undergo change on any linguistic level, i.e. in the vocabulary, phonology, morphology, syntax, or semantics (Thomason and Kaufman 1988, Thomason 2002, 2003, and Heine and Kuteva 2003, 2005). The transfer of vocabulary and phonology has been widely described for many languages. There has been less discussion of the transfer of grammatical features, particularly morphological features. Such features are in fact generally considered to be highly resistant to borrowing. Here we will examine a situation that appears—at first glance—to be a case of direct transfer of morphology. A closer look will show that the transfer of the Spanish nominalizer -ero into Sierra Popoluca is more complex and noteworthy than we might expect because of the involvement of a third language, Pajapan Nahuatl. 1 Introduction Sierra Popoluca is a native Mexican language that belongs to the Mixe- Zoquean family. People speak this language in the south part of the State of Veracruz, primarily in the municipality of Soteapan. At this point, Sierra Popoluca is still a robust language. Nevertheless, all the speakers are bilin- gual in Spanish. In the past however, Nahuatl was the primary language of contact. In fact, there are still some multilingual speakers, who speak Sierra Popoluca, Nahuatl and Spanish. This multilingual environment makes Sierra Popoluca an ideal language for the study of the grammatical consequences of language contact. Morphological features have generally been considered to be highly resistant to borrowings. It has been hypothesized that specific affixes are never borrowed directly, but are transferred into a language through the borrowing of large sets of derivationally related lexical items, i.e. pairs of words with and without the affixes. Sierra Popoluca appears to present an exception to this principle with the borrowing of a derivational suffix 222 salomÉ gutiÉrrez morales -teeroj from Spanish -ero. This happened without a large set of contrasting vocabulary pairs and without intensive and lengthy contact with Spanish. Bilingualism with Spanish goes back less than a half century. However, the marker was not borrowed directly from Spanish, but rather through the intermediary of Pajapan Nahuatl where the Spanish -ero was reanalyzed as -teeroj. 2 The Spanish Agentive Nominalizer 2.1 -ero Spanish has a very productive nominalizer suffix -ero as a part of its morphological devices. The suffix -ero is used to form nouns for people engaged in particular occupations/professions or for objects that have special functions as show in examples (1–4). (1) leche ‘milk’ lech-ero ‘milkman’ milk-nom (2) carne ‘meat’ carnic-ero ‘butcher’ meat-nom (3) libro ‘book’ libr-ero ‘bookcase’ book-nom (4) ropa ‘clothes’ rop-ero ‘closet’ clothes-nom The first two examples of nominals refer to human occupations, while the remaining two are related to objects with special functions. Nominals formed with the suffix -ero are plentiful in Spanish. 2.2 -dero / -tero Because so many of the Spanish stems to which the suffix -ero was added end in d or t, there is a significant inventory of Spanish nouns ending in -dero and -tero. Examples (5–8) show this case. (5) ganado ‘cattle’ ganadero ‘rancher’ (6) zapato ‘zapato’ zapatero ‘cobbler’.

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