Cambio cultural y conceptual por contacto. La pluralizacio´n en textos en guaraní y español en la época colonial tardía

CERNO, LEONARDO; GUTIÉRREZ MATÉ, MIGUEL; STEFFEN, JOACHIM

Augsburgo

Congreso; 20th Annual Conference of the Association of Portuguese and Spanish-Lexified Creoles (ACBLPE); 2022

Spoken Paraguayan Spanish displays a hugeamount of features whose origin has often been attributedto its age-long contact with the Guarani language. Among these, the lack ofnumber agreement both between the different words of the noun phrase andbetween the subject and the verb have been frequently highlighted (Palacios 2008). The extensive long-term bilingualism between Guarani and Spanish in Paraguayhas caused, according to the literature, linguistic transfer in bothdirections, giving rise to both Hispanized varieties of Guarani and Guaranizedvarieties of Spanish(Dietrich 2001).The aim of this presentation is to show theevolution of such transfer-driven phenomena based on a corpus of colonialletters written in Guarani that include numerous fragments in Spanish. Thecorpus consists in the letters written between 1750 and 1830 by the indigenous cabildos– mostly from the towns administered by the Jesuits – to the colonialauthorities (see LANGAS2012). Interestingly,the insertion of these Spanish fragments –whose length constantly increasedover time– invariably takes place within a Guarani textual matrix, whichcontrasts with the extensively documented case during the colonial era, inwhich small texts or words in Guarani are inserted in texts predominantlywritten in Spanish. Consequently, this corpus sets the basis for contrastiveanalysis of both languages. As specifically regards plural marking, we observelinguistic strategies that diverge from the corresponding canonical uses of Guaraniand Spanish (including the innovative use of kuera as a pluralizer inthe former and the frequent use of “stripped plurals” (Lipski 2010) in thelatter). We will analyze the different plural marking patternsfrom a structural, typological, sociolinguistic, and textual perspective, andcompare them with other innovative structures (of both languages) attested inour corpus. Finally, our findings on the evolution of plural marking will bebrought to the fore to check the validity of a much more general hypothesis: thatthe use of Spanish in these colonial texts was reflecting the first stages ofthe interlanguages that, as time went by and bilingualism became widespread, gaverise to today’s spoken Paraguayan Spanish. For this purpose, we will elaborateon (1) code switching and individual bilingualism as factors favoring linguistictransfer, (2) the impact of social bilingualism and the formation of code-switchingcommunities (Balam, Parafita Couto, Stadthagen-González 2020) on the regularization of contact phenomena, (3)the need of paying attention to instances of code switching in bilingual discoursesfor understanding the origins and evolution of contact-driven phenomena.