Verb morphology in South Bolivian Quechua : a case study of the Uma Piwra rural variety

This report presents a preliminary description of the verbal morphology of South Bolivian Quechua spoken by monolinguals in the town of Uma Piwra, Anzaldo-municipality, Cochabamba, Bolivia. The descriptive analysis presents the verbal morphology minimally composed by two constituents STEM +INFL. The stem constituent bears a lexical verb base (LVB) which takes the initial position, and to which noninflectional suffixes will combine. The LVB can be mono-morphemic or bi-morphemic, mono-morphemic bases are single roots that are morphologically unanalyzable synchronically, whereas bi-morphemic ones are formed through derivation, this involves adding unproductive lexeme building suffixes to form a LVB based on a verb, noun or an adjective. I report two types of non-inflectional productive suffixes: (i) simplex and complex. Simplex suffixes bear compositional meanings. Complex suffixes are bound morphemes resulting from the combination of two or more morphemes diachronically, however they have a meaning as unit and not necessarily compositional meanings as individual suffixes. This analysis is a new one both for South Bolivian Quechua and for other Quechuan languages, which have similar verb structure, in that it argues that a perspicuous and semantically transparent account must be based on a hierarchy of embedded constituent within the verbal word rather than on a flat structured template for ordering elements within that word. Different from earlier studies that focus on urban South Bolivian Quechua varieties, this study presents a description for a monolingual variety basing its analysis on a 20-hour natural corpus and it reports a simpler verb template since it organizes non-inflectional productive suffixes occupying fewer slots. Finally, the study makes its contributions in three areas: (i) it presents an original description for an undescribed dialect of monolingual speakers, (ii) it proposes a new view for South Bolivian Quechua grammar and (iii) it considers the case of Uma Piwra Quechua (UPQ) in recent morphological typologyLinguistic