Paraguayan Guarani the History of Guarani Is a History of Resilience
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grammars of world & minority languages Paraguayan Guarani Paraguayan The history of Guarani is a history of resilience. Paraguayan Guarani is a vibrant, modern language, mother tongue to millions of people in South America. It is the only indigenous A Grammar of language in the Americas spoken by a non-ethnically indigenous majority, and since 1992, A Grammar of it is also an official language of Paraguay alongside Spanish. This book provides the first comprehensive reference grammar of Modern Paraguayan Guarani written for an English- language audience. It is an accessible yet thorough and carefully substantiated description Paraguayan of the language’s phonology, morphosyntax, and semantics. It also includes information about its centuries of documented history and its current sociolinguistic situation. Examples come from literary sources and film, scholastic grammars, online newspapers, Guarani blogs and other publications, publicly accessible social media data, and the author’s own fieldwork. They are specifically chosen to reflect the diversity of uses of modern-day Guarani, with the aim of providing a realistic picture of the current state of the language in twenty-first century Paraguay. This book will benefit researchers and students of Guarani and Paraguay, such as linguists, anthropologists, ethnographers, sociologists, historians, or cultural studies and literature scholars. Typologically-oriented researchers and students of other Tupian and Amerindian Bruno Estigarribia languages will have reliable data for comparative purposes. Given the unique socio- historical profile of Guarani, researchers in fields such as language contact, bilingualism, code-switching, language planning, language education, and literacy will find this book a valuable reference resource. Bruno Estigarribia is Associate Professor of Spanish Linguistics in the Department of Romance Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill, Adjunct Faculty in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, and Affiliated Faculty in UNC’s Program in American Indian and Indigenous Studies and Program in Global Studies. m Bruno Estigarribia Cover design: www.ironicitalics.com A Grammar of Paraguayan Guarani GRAMMARS OF WORLD AND MINORITY LANGUAGES Series Editors Lily Kahn and Riitta-Liisa Valijärvi This series consists of accessible yet thorough open-access grammars of world and minority languages. The volumes are intended for a broad audience, including the scholarly community, students and the general public. The series is devoted to less commonly taught, regional, minority and endangered languages. Each volume includes a historical and sociolinguistic introduction to the language followed by sections on phonology, orthography, morphology, syntax and lexis, as well as addi- tional material, such as text samples. The series aims to promote and support the study, teaching and, in some cases, revitalisation of languages worldwide. Lily Kahn is Reader in Hebrew and Jewish Languages at UCL. Riitta-Liisa Valijärvi is Principal Teaching Fellow in Finnish and Minority Languages at UCL and Senior Lecturer in Finno-Ugric Languages at Uppsala University, Sweden. A Grammar of Paraguayan Guarani Bruno Estigarribia First published in 2020 by UCL Press University College London Gower Street London WC1E 6BT Available to download free: www.uclpress.co.uk Text © Bruno Estigarribia, 2020 Images © Author and copyright holders named in captions, 2020 Bruno Estigarribia has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as author of this work. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library. This book is published under a Creative Commons 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0). This licence allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information: Estigarribia, B. 2020. A Grammar of Paraguayan Guarani. London, UCL Press. https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781787352872 Further details about Creative Commons licences are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ Any third-party material in this book is published under the book’s Creative Commons licence unless indicated otherwise in the credit line to the material. If you would like to re-use any third-party material not covered by the book’s Creative Commons licence, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. ISBN: 978-1-78735-322-0 (Hbk) ISBN: 978-1-78735-292-6 (Pbk) ISBN: 978-1-78735-287-2 (PDF) DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781787352872 Contents List of figures xi Preface xii Acknowledgments xv Note on the presentation of language examples xvii 1. Introduction 1 1.1. Overview of the language 1 1.2. Brief history since the European colonization of the region 3 1.3. Sociolinguistic information 6 1.4. Basic pronunciation summary 8 1.5. Typological information 9 1.6. Contact with Spanish and other languages 16 1.7. Guarani as a second or foreign language 20 1.8. Pointers for students 21 2. Phonology and orthography: the sound system and its written representation 26 2.1. Sound inventory and pronunciation (segmental phonology) 26 2.1.1. Vowels and diphthongs 26 2.1.2. Consonants 30 2.2. Suprasegmental phonology 34 2.2.1. Syllable structure 35 2.2.2. Stress 36 2.2.3. Nasal harmony 39 2.2.4. Prosody sketch: practical considerations for pronunciation 45 2.3. The alphabet or achegety and modern orthographic conventions in Paraguay 46 2.3.1. History of orthographic conventions 46 2.3.2. Recommended orthography 46 v 3. Nominals 57 3.1. Nouns 57 3.1.1. Plural marking 59 3.1.2. Gender marking 62 3.1.3. Relational (multiform) nominal roots 63 3.1.4. Functions of noun phrases in a sentence 69 3.2. Forming nouns from other words 70 3.2.1. Nominalizations 71 3.2.1.1. Nominalizing suffixes 71 3.2.1.1.1. General nominalizer -ha 71 3.2.1.1.2. Passive -py 73 3.2.1.1.3. Adjectival -va 74 3.2.1.1.4. Abstract -kue 75 3.2.1.2. Nominalizing prefixes 77 3.2.1.2.1. Resultative/instrumental t-embi- 77 3.2.1.2.2. Reflexive/passive/imper- sonal je- 79 3.2.1.2.3. Reciprocal jo- 80 3.2.1.2.4. Abstract t-eko- 81 3.2.1.2.5. Abstract mba'e- 82 3.2.1.3. Noun compounds 82 3.2.2. Nominal/adjectival negation 85 3.2.3. Diminutives and attenuatives 86 3.3. Adjectival modifiers of the noun 87 3.4. Determiners 89 3.4.1. Articles 90 3.4.2. Demonstratives 94 3.4.3. Numerals and quantifiers 99 3.5. Pronouns 105 3.5.1 Personal pronouns 105 3.5.2 Interrogative pronouns 111 3.5.3 Indefinite and negative pronouns 113 3.5.4 Demonstrative pronouns 115 3.5.5 Possessive pronouns 116 3.6. Possessive noun phrases 117 3.7. Nominal temporal-aspectual markers 121 4. Verbs 126 4.1 Intransitive verbs 127 4.1.1. Active verbs 128 4.1.2. Inactive verbs 130 vi CONTENTS 4.2. Transitive verbs 132 4.3. Ditransitive verbs 140 4.4. Postpositional complement verbs 141 4.5. Irregular verbs 146 4.6. Relational (multiform) verbs 148 4.7. Verbs with increments 150 4.8. Verbs with loss of initial consonant 152 4.9. Verbal negation 154 4.10. Expressing properties of events: tense, aspect, mood/modality, evidentiality 157 4.10.1 Tense 157 4.10.2 Aspect 163 4.10.3 Mood and modality 170 4.10.3.1. Expressing commands 170 4.10.3.1.1 Basic imperative mood 170 4.10.3.1.2 Imperative modalizers 172 4.10.3.1.3 Prohibitive mood 176 4.10.3.2. Expressing possibility and ability 178 4.10.3.3. Expressing obligation and permission 180 4.10.3.4. Expressing desire and volition 181 4.10.3.4.1 Volitive mood 181 4.10.3.4.2 Hortative and optative mood 183 4.10.3.5. Expressing negative evaluations 186 4.11. Verbalizations 188 4.12. Modifiers of the verb 190 4.13. Verb compounds 192 5. Postpositions 194 5.1. Postpositions marking a predicate’s complements 194 5.2. Postpositions of place 197 5.3. Postpositions of time 198 5.4. Other postpositions 200 6. Voice 203 6.1. Active voice 203 6.2. Inactive voice 204 6.3. Passive/reflexive/impersonal voice 207 6.3.1. With intransitive verbs: generic and impersonal interpretations 208 6.3.2. With transitive verbs: passive and reflexive interpretations 209 CONTENTS vii 6.4. Reciprocal voice 211 6.5. Antipassive voice 213 6.6. Causative voice 215 6.6.1. Causative voice for intransitive verbs 215 6.6.2. Sociative causative 218 6.6.3. Causative voice for transitive verbs 220 7. Evidentiality 223 7.1. Emphatic and veridical markers 223 7.2. Markers of hearsay 225 7.3. Markers of direct evidence 226 7.4. Markers of reasoned evidence 227 8. Basic clauses 230 8.1. Word order in simple clauses 230 8.2. Predicative and equative clauses 231 8.3. Location and existence clauses 232 8.4. Sentences expressing possession 235 8.4.1. Non-verbal possessive sentences 235 8.4.2. Verbal possessive sentences 236 8.5. Questions 237 9. Quantification 241 10. Degree expressions 246 10.1. Comparatives 246 10.2. Superlatives 249 11. Noun incorporation into the verb 255 12. Complex sentences 259 12.1. Coordinated clauses 259 12.2. Subordinate clauses 263 12.2.1. Relative clauses 263 12.2.2. Complement clauses 267 12.2.3. Adverbial clauses 271 12.2.3.1. Purposive 271 12.2.3.2. Concessive 272 12.2.3.3.