Grammatical gender in Zapotec/Spanish monolingual and bilingual speakers

On the subtle nature of crosslinguistic influence

Abstract

As inanimate nouns are not classified according to grammatical gender in Zapotec, it is legitimate to wonder whether it is possible that the influence of Zapotec on Spanish plays a role in the quantity and in the grammatical and structural contexts where pronoun “lo” is used as a substitute for “la”. We also address whether or not there are differences between the Zapotec/Spanish bilinguals and the Spanish monolinguals, as Spanish monolinguals have been in contact with Zapotec/Spanish bilinguals for generations. We have analyzed data from 40 adults, 20 Spanish monolinguals and 20 Zapotec/Spanish bilinguals in San Cristóbal Lachirioag, Oaxaca, Mexico. The data analysis carried out on the three experimental tasks administered to the participants shows differences between the bilingual and the monolingual groups, both in terms of the number of inherent feminine nouns that are pronominalized with "lo" and with respect to the structural contexts where this occurs. Another relevant finding relates to the differences between the first task (classification of nouns according to gender) and the second task (gender agreement), which leads us to propose that the two groups of participants have problems with gender agreement but not with gender assignment.