El marcador dizen que en el español andino del siglo XVII: la crónica de Santacruz Pachacuti

Abstract

This study analyzes the uses of dice (and its variants dicen, dice que) in the chronicle of Santa Cruz Pachacuti, a seventeenth-century Quechua/Spanish bilingual speaker who was immersed in two linguistic and cultural traditions. We try to establish the status of this marker in the beginnings of what would later be called ‘Andean Spanish’. Our aim is to situate the evidential and narrative meanings of dice in that period, and to show whether the cases that appear in the chronicle can be considered similar to current Andean reportative uses of dice (Escobar 2001) or whether, on the contrary, they are narrative uses, as proposed by Andrade (2007). The data of the analysis indicate that this marker, which has narrative value in this chronicle, has undergone a contact-induced linguistic change that occurs in early times due to the context of linguistic and cultural contact in which the Santa Cruz Pachacuti is immersed. These values have been explained because of the influence of Quechua, specifically the evidential marker -s/si, -sh/-shi, together with the very tradition that this element has in Spanish. We try to determine whether the linguistic mechanism of convergence, which seems to explain these values in a more coherent way today, had already been activated by bilingual speakers at that stage of the linguistic change.