“Extraña uno lo que es la tortillas”: A preliminary study of number agreement in Spanish in contact with Purépecha

Regarding studies of Spanish in contact with Latin American indigenous languages, there has been little research on contact between Spanish and Purépecha, a language isolate from western Mexico. The present paper addresses this lacuna by examining number marking and number agreement in the Spanish production of five L1 adult Purépecha speakers, and it contributes to both the fields of second language studies and contact linguistics studies, by detecting specific structural and semantic conditions under which Purépecha morphosyntactic patterns are incorporated into Spanish: Results show non-standard number marking and lack of number agreement across the noun phrase, between the subject and the verb, and between the noun and its predicative adjective, possibly due to a shift dynamic (Thomason, 2001).