Spanish-Origin Verbal and Grammatical Borrowing in Paraguayan Guaraní

Previous work on language change in contact situations has treated lexical borrowing and grammatical borrowing as discrete phenomena (Appel and Muysken 1987, Thomason 2001, Campbell 2013). Claims that lexical borrowing needs to occur before grammatical borrowing (e.g. Thomason and Kaufmann 1988) or that grammar can be borrowed without any lexicon (e.g. Aikhenvald 2002) are often mentioned in the literature. This dissertation explores the interplay between grammatical constructions (in the sense of Goldberg 2006) and lexical elements in intense contact situations. More specifically, it addresses the following research question: Are grammatical constructions borrowed independently from the elements contained in said constructions? To answer this question, the present research project analyzes the influence of Spanish on Paraguayan Guaraní, both languages spoken in South America, which have been in intense contact for five centuries. The research question is addressed via three empirical studies using a 40-hour corpus of sociolinguistic interviews (Labov 2001). The first study focuses on the motivations to borrow verbs and the effects that the adopted elements have in the internal organization of the recipient language (see, for instance, Haspelmath 2009). The main finding of this study is that loan verbs coexist with their native-origin counterparts in part because they occur in different grammatical constructions. The second study explores differential object marking, and the factors that favor the occurrence of -pe, a human direct object marker. Results show that younger, more Spanish-dominant speakers, have a higher usage rate of the feature, and that -pe suffixes to loans more frequently than to native-origin nouns. The third study compares the behavior of the polysemous verbal prefix je- among loan verbs and among native-origin verbs. It was found that the primary function of je- is as middle-marker (MM). Even more s