Spanish loan verbs in Paraguayan Guaraní: coexistence, replacement, or both?

• Josefina Bittar ^[1]
  1. [1] University of California System

     University of California System

     Estados Unidos

     
• Localización: Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone linguistics, ISSN-e 2199-3386, ISSN 1939-0238, Vol. 16, Nº. 2, 2023, págs. 305-338
• Idioma: inglés
• Enlaces
  • Texto Completo Ejemplar
• Resumen

  • Contact linguists have proposed that core borrowing can indicate language attrition – as the loan replaces its native-origin counterpart – while cultural borrowing expands the lexicon (Campbell, Lyle. 2013. Historical linguistics: An introduction, 3rd edn. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press; Muysken, Pieter. 2000. Bilingual speech: A typology of code-mixing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). However, Tadmor and Haspelmath (Tadmor, Uri & Martin Haspelmath. 2009. Loanwords in the world’s languages: A comparative handbook. Berlin: De Gruyter) found that in core borrowing cases, coexistence of the foreign and the native forms is more common than replacement. In this paper, I explore coexistence and replacement scenarios of Spanish-origin core loan verbs and their native-origin counterparts in Paraguayan Guaraní. These loans have been previously described as instances of code-switching (Estigarribia, Bruno. 2017. Insertion and backflagging as mixing strategies underlying Guaraní-Spanish mixed words. In Bruno Estigarribia & Justin Pinta (eds.), Guaraní linguistics in the 21st century, 315–347. Leiden: Brill; Kallfell, Guido. 2016. ¿Cómo hablan los paraguayos con dos lenguas?: gramática del jopara. Asunción: CEADUC). Tokens of highly frequent native-origin verbs along with their broadly equivalent Spanish-origin loans were extracted from 40 interviews and were correlated with the senses of each verb. Results show that some Spanish verb loans replace its native-origin counterpart to convey only one of its senses, while the native-origin form remains the preferred form to convey the other senses. This specialized use also suggests that these semantically specialized Spanish verb loans are not code-switches but rather integrated lexical items in Guaraní.