Word order variation in Mbyá Guaraní

Abstract

This paper presents the preliminary results of a multifactorial analysis of word order in Mbyá Guaraní, a Tupí-Guaraní language spoken in Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay, based on a corpus of written narratives with multiple layers of annotation. Our goals are to assess the validity of previous claims about Mbyá word order (Martins, 2003; Dooley, 1982; Dooley, 2015), and to explore the effects of different types of factors on the position of core arguments relative to their verb. We show that SV and VO are the most frequently attested orders in matrix clauses and that subordinate clauses favour the OV order. Givenness, transitivity and clause type (root vs subordinate) are found to be significant predictors of word order. We identify differences in object position between Mbyá and Paraguayan Guaraní (Tonhauser and Colijn, 2010), and we argue that these differences support Dietrich (2009)’s proposal that Tupí-Guaraní languages are undergoing a change in word order from OV to VO, induced by contact with Spanish and Portuguese.