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In:Spanish Socio-Historical Linguistics: Isolation and contact
Edited by Whitney Chappell and Bridget Drinka
[Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics 12] 2021
► pp. 185–204

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Vamos en Palma ‘we are going to Palma’

On the persistence (and demise) of a contact feature in the Spanish of Majorca

 | Universitat de les Illes Balears
Published online: 13 May 2021
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https://doi.org/10.1075/ahs.12.c08enr
Abstract
This study analyzes historical and contemporary data of Spanish produced by Catalan-dominant bilinguals in Majorca to explore the origin and historical evolution of a contact feature of Majorcan Spanish: the preposition en to express direction of movement. The transgenerational survival of this feature of Majorcan Spanish for over three centuries points to a scenario of intra-community recycling of a structure that emerged as the result of incomplete grammatical competence in Spanish and was then perpetuated by limited contact with monolingual Spanish speakers. The changing linguistic ecology of Majorca, however, with wider access to canonical varieties of Spanish in the last half century, has facilitated the demise of this trait among younger urban generations.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Data and methodology
  • 3.Directional uses of en
  • 4.Looking for the source of Majorcan Spanish directional en
    • 4.1Majorcan Catalan
    • 4.2Simplification and hypergeneralization
    • 4.3Historical data
  • 5.On the historical continuity of directional en
  • 6.Summary and conclusions
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
References (31)
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[no author supplied]
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