“Después tampoco no podía trabajar”. Negation in Spanish spoken by Mapudungun-Spanish bilinguals

Abstract

Studies about the Spanish variety spoken by Mapudungun-Spanish bilinguals or español mapuchizado have reported a series of divergent features that makes it different from Chilean Spanish. However, until now no studies about the domain of negation in that variety of Spanish have been done. This work aims to study negation in this language variety from the perspective of language contact and linguistic typology. The study is done from twenty interviews directed to bilingual Mapudungun-Spa­nish bilinguals from two Mapuche communities from La Araucanía region, Chile. The analysis of the interview evidence the use of negative constructions in which both clausal negation no and N-words such as tampoco and nunca occur in the clause in preverbal position and the N-word occurring before clausal negative marker, a type of construction not found in standard Spanish. Despite the systematic occurrence of this constructions in the corpus, their frequency is low and is not conventionalized. Possible explanations for these constructions found in a language contact scenario are discussed.