| This dissertation explores the degree and nature of lexical borrowing between Spanish and the highland Ecuadorian variety of Kichwa spoken in the community of Salasaca. Spanish loanword outcomes in Salasaka Kichwa (SK) at the lexical, morpho-syntactic and phonological levels are the focus of this case study, which analyzes the pervasiveness and relative distributions of borrowing in SK across syntactic categories and parts of speech, the interplay of speaker variables such as age and sex in shaping borrowing patterns and potential language change in progress, and the structural assimilation and substitution strategies employed by speakers of SK to bring borrowed lexemes into compliance with grammatical constraints of the language.;This study fills a current gap in the literature by employing naturalistic data collection to form the corpus for loanword study, by exploring the role of extra-linguistic variables such as speaker age and sex in shaping loanword phenomena in a diglossic contact scenario, and by doing so in the context of a relatively isolated and understudied bilingual community. This investigation also contributes to a small but growing literature on contact linguistics between Spanish and Ecuadorian Kichwa, to a broader understanding of language contact universals, and of the underlying constraints of SK grammar. By analyzing loanword data from the speech of twelve consultants, this study finds that lexical borrowing averages 16.3%, ranging from 8% to 26% across participants. The categorical patterns of Spanish loanwords in SK largely follow predictive models advanced in the literature, favoring open-class items. The speaker variable of age reflects a statistically significant correlation with total rate of borrowing in the individual speech samples, as well as with unstressed medial vowel raising as a phonological integration strategy. Other morpho-phonological assimilation outcomes surface as predicted by proposed principles of compatibility between linguistic systems, including the nearly categorical insertion of lexical noun and verb stems and isolated forms, which openly accept SK agglutinating affixes. Observed segment-level and prosodic repairs by SK speakers show tendencies that affirm existing hypotheses about Kichwa phonology. |
