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·埃姆伦在布鲁斯曼海姆博士的指导下，将进行语言人类学研究，研究人们在复杂的语言接触情况下如何协商他们的多语言能力。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，该地区是Machiguenga人的传统家园。这个山谷是安第斯山脉中部高地和亚马逊低地之间的主要通道，目前是讲克丘亚语和西班牙语的农牧民、商人和天然气公司工人大规模殖民和开发的地点。在有历史记载之前，该地区就一直是安第斯山脉和亚马逊河流域频繁接触的地区，今天高地人和低地人并肩生活。研究者将重点关注上乌鲁班巴地区两个社区的西班牙语、Machiguenga语和Quechua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流域系统之间的主要商业联系，另一个是高地人和Machiguenga人通婚并共同生活的小型“混合”社区。这种情况作为语言接触的地点是有趣的，因为在其他地区发现的许多社会文化坐标并没有清晰地映射到上乌鲁班巴。注意力将集中在说话者如何利用每种语言的形式属性，如单词，声音，语法结构，以及更高层次的语言现象，如话语和表演风格。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定量测量。语言接触研究在安第斯山脉倾向于检查安第斯语言和西班牙语之间的关系。该项目将扩大语言接触研究的范围，从更广泛的地理角度研究其他土著语言。该项目还将利用考古学，历史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。资助这项研究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.