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Part of
Language Contact and Change in Mesoamerica and Beyond
Edited by Karen Dakin, Claudia Parodi and Natalie Operstein
[Studies in Language Companion Series 185] 2017
► pp. 188–208

Chapter 9
The impact of language contact in Nahuatl couplets

| Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

In the pre-Hispanic period, couplets were widely used in ritual or ceremonial contexts, and they prevailed in the contact period through their use in evangelical texts to convey a more indigenous character to evangelization materials. Nahuatl couplets were recreated to achieve a better reception for Catholic dogma; this textual strategy was a way to introduce new meanings into the belief system of native peoples in New Spain. As is well known, the contact between Spanish and Nahuatl led to a process of intensive borrowing. The aim of this paper is to show how this particular situation of language contact influenced the couplets employed in doctrines, sermons, confession manuals, catechisms, hymns, grammars, dictionaries and other evangelization texts. The analysis will deal with couplets that were created from borrowed lexemes from Spanish and native lexemes in Nahuatl.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The linguistic context of evangelization
  • 3.Couplets in evangelization texts
    • 3.1Inflexional affixes are added
    • 3.2The most productive syntactic processes
    • 3.3Semantic modifications
  • 4.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 30 June 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.185.09deo
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