Abstract
Southern Peruvian Quechua is an indigenous language spoken primarily in rural communities in the Peruvian Andes. The language includes a syntactic construction, ‘-paq’, that expresses purpose or function, thus providing an opportunity to trace how parents and children with little formal education express teleological concepts. The authors recorded parent–child dyads (N = 36; children aged 3–5 years) talking about items in a picture book, and coded uses of -paq (e.g., ‘What is that little [toy] bear for?’ [‘Chay usuchari ima
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