La Construcción de Fingimiento Ñembo-/Ñemo del guaraní paraguayo

Abstract

This article analyzes the Paraguayan Guarani Ñembo-/Ñemo- Feigning Construction with two aims. The first is to broaden the description of the construction, shedding light on its syntactic and semantic possibilities and restrictions. To that end, evidence of the construction is analyzed according to its behavior with aspectual classes, valency classes, the scope of negation and the -pa/-mba suffix. The second objective is to assess the hypothesis that the construction arose in the language as a result of the contact with Spanish. The analysis of earlier records of the language and of closely related languages indeed yields evidence consistent with the hypothesis.