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The abstraction and concretion of indigenous languages, according to missionary grammars of the Lima Archdiocese, 16th and 17th centuries

Mutatis Mutandis, ISSN: 2011-799X, Vol: 11, Issue: 1, Page: 6-23
2018
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Article Description

In this paper, our object of study is the way in which grammarian missionaries in Latin America focused the discussion on the relationship between abstraction and concretion from a linguistic perspective. Due to its linguistic and ecclesiastical policies, for this analysis we have selected as our corpus a set of grammar works written in the Archdiocese of Lima, during the 16th and 17th centuries. In these works, we see how this discussion was expressed in missionary grammatical treatises through the treatment of the expression, in indigenous American languages, of abstract concepts; or else, through their non-expression because of a supposed pre-eminence of concrete terms. From a grammatical and semantic analysis, we discover that, following the classical tradition, the distinction that relates the abstract to 'notions' and the concrete to 'material entities' predominates. On one hand, this idea is found explicitly in the description of the 'abstract name', which is defined as a morphological category in the classical and renaissance grammatical tradition; on the other hand, we detect this issue in the linguistic expression of quantification and temporality, thanks to the underlying idea of 'measurement' in the semantic content of both.

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