Quechua

Most popularly known as the general language of the Inca,   Quechua is not one language but a name applied to over 45 different languages spoken in the South American Andes.  About half of the estimated 8.5 million speakers live in Peru.  The rest are spread throughout Ecuador, Bolivia, Columbia, Argentina, and Chile.  Genetic ties between Quechua and other language families have yet to be discovered.  The first branching of the Quechuan dialects is estimated to have occurred about 1,100 years ago.  Brought about by the expansion of the Inca empire, the spread has continued until the present century.


Syntax/Discourse

The enclitic suffix -qa is manifest throughout Quechua because -qa serves as a topic marker.  Topic markers can be used both to establish a new topic and to continue a topic.  -qa is only used for marking old information in discourse.  The syntactic categories to which -qa is suffixed are hardly limited; -qa may be suffixed on nouns, pronouns, adjectives, nominalized clauses, etc.  However, -qa does not occur on negative lexemes (mana and ama), the conjunctions, y 'and' and o 'or' borrowed from Spanish, or within subordinate clauses.  One -qa may occur per sentence.

Noqapis   munaa   rigiku      -y       -ta        -qa.

I-too           I-want    believe    -INF   -OBJ   -TOP

'I also want to believe'.


Syntax

One of the interesting features of Quechua syntax is that there is no grammatical basis for distinguishing relativization* and nominalization** because  Quechua does not differentiate nouns and adjectives as distinct lexical categories.  For example, both nouns and adjectives may be used as subject or object followed by a case marker:

rumi-ta            rikaa
stone-ACC    I see
'I see a/the stone.'
hatun-ta          rikka
big-ACC        I see
'I see a/the big (one).'

As a result, there is not enough evidence to conclude that nominalizations and relativized clauses form independent syntactic classes as follows:

Qaynunchaw   wasi       ruwa     -sqa        -yki   -ta    riku-ni
Yesterday       house    make   NOM   2       AC    see-1

I see the house that you built yesterday.     Relativized clause

I see that you built a house yesterday.        Nominalization (Complement clause)

* Relativization is the formation of a clause which modifies the head of a noun phrase.  For example, in 'the man who came' 'who came' modifies 'man'.

** Nominalizations are constructions that have properties of noun phrases but are headed by an element that is to some extent verbal.


Quechua at Stanford

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