Constraints on morphological borrowing: evidence from Latin America

In this article, we discuss the borrowing of morphology from Spanish by three unrelated and typologically diffferent American-Indian languages: Quechua, Guarani and Otomi. On the basis of three corpora of spontaneous speech produced by a sizeable number of informants, we will suggest that there are strong constraints on the transfer of bound morphemes from a model language to a basic language in a contact situation. Although all three languages borrow lexical material from Spanish at a rather large scale, from diffferent parts of speech, including several grammatical ones, few native forms receive Spanish morphological marking. On the other hand, borrowed forms may enter the languages with diffferent kinds of Spanish afffijixes. These ‘Trojan horses’ may be paving the road to their eventual use with native lexemes.