In my thesis I seek to investigate the occurrence of free variation of direct and indirect object clitics in Limeño Spanish contact varieties. The objective is to determine whether these contact varieties may become a single clitic and possibly single object variety due to transfer from Quechua dialects through Andean Spanish into Limeño. This would proof that there is real substrate influence leading to change, as reported for Quiteño Ecuadorian Spanish and Paraguayan Spanish.
Previous studies (Myers 1973, Paredes 1996, Caravedo 1990, 1999, Camacho and Sanchez 2002, Klee and Caravedo 2005) have shown that the phenomenon exists and to what extent. Linguistic and extra-linguistic variables have been identified in descriptive, quantitative, longitudinal studies focusing mainly on problems of second language acquisition. Apart from complex sociolinguistic environments, clitic choice and usage is also conditioned on the one hand by constraining features of the object arguments such as animacy, definiteness and specificity, ensuring the referential structure of a sentence, and by verbal subcategorization requirements. On the other hand, non-standard object clitic choice has to be linked to contact with Quechua languages that show no gender marking but rely heavily on morphological case to mark grammatical relations. I will be looking at a set of surface variants expressing possibly different semantic structures.
Based on the empirical findings of my data collection in Lima-Peru (Feb-Mar 2006), I will analyse and describe the syntactic phenomenon in LFG.

Sub-Thesis, MLing 2004: 'Clitic Doubling in Limeño: A Case Study in LFG'