Restructuring and complexification of inflectional morphology under linguistic contact: the case of a Galician dialect

Abstract

Galician has been in contact with Spanish since the very origins of both languages. Galician and Spanish are strongly structurally, genetically and typologically related. As the intensity of the contact has been growing and the number of bilingual speakers has been steadily increasing along the 20th century, more and more grammatical Spanish features entered into Galician. In this study, we analyse how the borrowing of Spanish morphological patterns that hypercharacterize the expression of various morphosyntactic features of some verbs causes a restructuring in the grammar of an urban variety of Galician mainly spoken by bilinguals. The incorporation of those Spanish borrowings also seems to provoke an increase in the complexity of the grammar of this Galician variety. We reflect on whether what seems to be a complexification from the point of view of an isolated grammar may be considered a simplification from the point of view of a bilingual mind/speaker.