Doctoral Dissertation Research: Language Contact and Language Change in the Andes-Amazon Borderland

密歇根大学博士生尼古拉斯·埃姆伦将在布鲁斯·曼海姆博士的指导下，从事语言人类学研究，研究人们在复杂的语言接触情况下如何谈判他们的多种语言能力。这项研究将在秘鲁南部乌鲁班巴河上游地区复杂的语言生态中进行，那里是麦金加人的传统家园。这个山谷是连接安第斯山脉中部高地和亚马孙低地的主要通道，目前是说盖丘亚语和西班牙语的农业牧民、商人和天然气公司工人大规模殖民和开发的地方。自有历史记载以来，该地区一直是安第斯-亚马逊地区强烈接触的地点，今天高地人和低地人毗邻而居。研究人员将重点研究上乌鲁班巴地区两个社区西班牙语、马基瓜加语和克丘亚语之间的语言接触：一个是边境城镇，是高地公路经济和亚马逊河系之间的主要商业纽带；另一个是高地人和马基贡加人通婚并生活在一起的“混合”小社区。作为语言接触的场所，这种情况很有趣，因为在其他地区发现的许多社会文化坐标并不能清晰地映射到上乌鲁班巴。将注意说话者如何利用每种语言的形式特征，如单词、声音、语法结构，以及更高层次的语言现象，如语篇和表演风格。研究者将参与观察，进行结构化和非结构化访谈，并对语音变异和社会因素进行量化测量。安第斯山脉的语言接触研究倾向于考察安第斯语言和西班牙语之间的关系。该项目将从更广泛的地理角度将语言接触研究的范围扩大到其他土著语言。该项目还将利用考古学、历史学和历史语言学来了解安第斯-亚马逊关系在不同时间深度的语言性质。为这项研究提供资金支持社会科学家的教育。

University of Michigan doctoral student, Nicholas Emlen, with the guidance of Dr. Bruce Mannheim, will undertake linguistic anthropological research on how people in complex language contact situations negotiate their multilingualism. The research will be carried out in the complex linguistic ecology of the Upper Urubamba River area of Southern Peru, the traditional home of the Machiguenga people. This valley serves as a major conduit between the Central Andean highlands and the Amazonian lowlands, and is currently the site of massive colonization and development by Quechua-speaking and Spanish-speaking agro-pastoralists, traders, and gas company workers. The area has been the site of periods of intense Andean-Amazonian contact since before recorded history, and today highlanders and lowlanders live side-by-side. The resarcher will focus on language contact between Spanish, Machiguenga, and Quechua in two communities in the Upper Urubamba area: a frontier town that serves as the main commercial link between the highland road-based economy and the Amazonian river system, and a small "mixed" community in which highlanders and Machiguengas have intermarried and live together. This situation is interesting as a site of language contact because many of the sociocultural coordinates that are found in other areas do not map cleanly onto the Upper Urubamba. Attention will be paid to the ways in which speakers draw on the formal properties of each language, such as words, sounds, grammatical structures, as well as higher-order linguistic phenomena such as discourse and performance styles. The researcher will engage in participant observation, conduct structured and unstructured interviews, and carry out quantitative measurement of phonological variation and social factors. Language contact studies in the Andes tend to examine the relationship between the Andean languages and Spanish. This project will broaden the scope of language contact research to other indigenous languages in a broader geographical perspective. The project will also draw on archaeology, history, and historical linguistics to understand the linguistic nature of the Andes-Amazon relationship at various time depths. Funding this research supports the education of a social scientist.