Gualapuro Gualapuro Santiago David
School of Languages and Linguistics, College of Liberal Arts, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Carbondale, IL, United States.
Front Hum Neurosci. 2024 Sep 30;18:1405373. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2024.1405373. eCollection 2024.
Most studies on the pragmatic interpretation of existential quantifiers have been conducted in major Indo-European languages like English, Spanish, French, and Greek, focusing mainly on monolingual participants. However, in indigenous linguistic research, especially experimental research, it is crucial to consider several linguistic and extra-linguistic factors for successful implementation. Our research centered on the experimental investigation of the pragmatic interpretation of the quantifier , meaning in Kichwa, with Kichwa-Spanish bilingual adults from the province of Imbabura Ecuador. We employed the Truth Value Judgement Task (TVJT) for our experiments and incorporated the explicit Question Under Discussion (QUD) paradigm to facilitate pragmatic interpretations among our participants. Our initial experiment revealed a 78% acceptance level for the pragmatic interpretation of "some, but not all" in Kichwa, significantly lower than the 95% acceptance range observed in other languages. We hypothesized that access to technology and formal education might influence these results, leading us to simplify our experiment by eliminating the technological components of the research. In our subsequent experiment, adult speakers of Imbabura Kichwa achieved a 97% accuracy level, comparable to speakers of other languages. To benchmark our results against speakers of other languages under similar conditions, we evaluated whether Spanish speakers from two varieties in Ecuador (Quito and Guayaquil) could generate the "some, but not all" scalar implicature with the Spanish quantifier . Our findings indicated that speakers achieved 95.5 and 97.4% accuracy for both varieties, respectively. Therefore, this study infers that under optimal conditions, speakers of indigenous languages in rural communities demonstrate commendable performance in experimental linguistic studies. Nonetheless, it underscores the necessity for meticulous planning and distinct handling in experimental studies involving speakers of these languages residing in rural areas without access to technological elements. We propose that such research broadens our comprehension of language utilization in minority communities and positively influences language restoration efforts by expanding experimental linguistics studies to indigenous languages.
大多数关于存在量词语用解释的研究都是在英语、西班牙语、法语和希腊语等主要印欧语言中进行的，主要关注单语参与者。然而，在本土语言研究中，尤其是实验研究中，为了成功实施，考虑几个语言和语言外因素至关重要。我们的研究集中于对基切瓦语中量词“pachakuna”（意为“一些，但不是全部”）语用解释的实验调查，研究对象是来自厄瓜多尔因巴布拉省的基切瓦 - 西班牙语双语成年人。我们在实验中采用了真值判断任务（TVJT），并纳入了明确的讨论问题（QUD）范式，以促进参与者之间的语用解释。我们的初步实验显示，基切瓦语中“一些，但不是全部”的语用解释接受率为78%，显著低于其他语言中观察到的95%的接受范围。我们假设获得技术和正规教育可能会影响这些结果，这促使我们通过消除研究中的技术成分来简化实验。在我们随后的实验中，因巴布拉基切瓦语的成年使用者达到了97%的准确率，与其他语言的使用者相当。为了在类似条件下将我们的结果与其他语言的使用者进行比较，我们评估了来自厄瓜多尔两个变体（基多和瓜亚基尔）的西班牙语使用者是否能够用西班牙语量词“algunos”产生“一些，但不是全部”的等级含义。我们的研究结果表明，两个变体的使用者准确率分别达到了95.5%和97.4%。因此，本研究推断，在最佳条件下，农村社区的本土语言使用者在实验语言学研究中表现出值得称赞的能力。尽管如此，它强调了在涉及这些居住在没有技术元素的农村地区的语言使用者的实验研究中进行细致规划和特殊处理的必要性。我们建议此类研究拓宽我们对少数群体社区语言使用的理解，并通过将实验语言学研究扩展到本土语言，对语言复兴努力产生积极影响。
