Direct object deletion in Ecuadorian Highland Spanish revisited

Abstract

On the basis of data collected among 28 Quichua-Spanish bilinguals and Spanish monolinguals interviewees, and taking into account semantic, syntactic and pragmatic-discursive perspectives, this article is devoted to the analysis of direct object deletion in Ecuadorian Highland Spanish. We claim that the case of pronoun deletion under analysis is the last stage of third person pronominal forms grammaticalization processes which must have started in the Middle Age and have had a meaningful development in Ecuadorian Highland Spanish due to Spanish-Quichua contact. On the one hand, such contact has increased the cases of deletion, on the other, it is evident that some of the semantic restrictions other Spanish varieties display are generally dismissed. Consequently, deleting pronominal forms becomes a very productive and efficient strategy used by the speaker to emphasize the relevance of each speech event.