Abstract

VILORIA RODRIGUEZ, Leonel; DE LA ROSA YACOMELO, Johan; RAMIREZ GONZALEZ, Rudecindo  and  GARCIA SEGURA, Daniela. Pronouns in Wayuunaiki and Spanish: A Contrastive Analysis. Íkala [online]. 2022, vol.27, n.1, pp.153-173.  Epub Mar 11, 2022. ISSN 0123-3432.  https://doi.org/10.17533/udea.ikala.v27n1a08.

Contrastive studies between Colombian aboriginal languages and Spanish are scarce. To fill this gap, this study provides a contrastive analysis of the subject, direct object, and indirect object pronouns in both Wayuunaiki and Spanish. The comparison is part of contrastive linguistics and accounts for the similarities and differences between the grammatical systems of both languages. The results show some similarities between the two languages related to the use of null subjects and the fact that their pronouns, with some excep­tions for the subject, do not establish differences between genders for the first and second person, contrary to what happens for the third. On the other hand, they also reveal some notable differences in relation to the position that these grammatical units occupy in the sentence structure, the marks used when the subject pronoun is not explicitly stated, and the morphological structure. This study constitutes a first contrastive look at both languages and has implications for language teaching, trans­lation, language contact studies and bilingualism, given the identification it makes of possible interferences, variations and linguistic changes.

Keywords : bilingualism; language teaching and learning; Spanish; contrastive linguistics; pronouns; langue Wayuunaiki.

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