Contact Linguistics. Chap

L1 lexical entry L2 lexical entry

phonological representation x phonological representation y

s yntactic features x syntactic features y
semantic features x semantic features y
morphological features x morphological features y


Contact Language lexical entry
phonological representation y
syntactic features x
semantic features x
morphological features x

Note: Syntactic features include information about category membership and, where relevant, subcategorization properties.

The characteristic features of Media Lengua are in keeping with the view that the language was created by Quechua-dominant bilinguals. They simply relabeled the majority of Quechua content items with Spanish phonetic shapes, while retaining the Quechua morpho-syntactic apparatus more or less intact. This strategy of L1 retention with incorporation of L2 lexical forms is of course common to many cases of bilingual mixture, including cases of lexical borrowing and intra-sentential code-switching. More specifically, the incorporation of Spanish forms into a Quechua morphosyntactic frame in Media Lengua parallels the insertion of single morpheme switches into a Matrix Language frame that we find in many cases of intra-sentential code switching. What distinguishes Media Lengua is the scope of incorporation of external lexical forms, and the way they are made to conform in almost all respects to the working of Quechua grammar. The limited structural borrowing from Spanish into ML grammar, is also in keeping with the view that Quechua was the matrix language.

As we will see in section 6 below, there are other intertwined languages with a pattern of mixture quite similar to that of Medial Lengua, except that they involve insertions from the ancestral language into the morphosyntactic frame of the newly-acquired language. But first, let us consider a bilingual mixed language that displays a very different pattern of mixture.