Motivaciones para la posición variable del sujeto en guaraní paraguayo

Abstract

Paraguayan Guarani is considered to have an SVO basic word order, albeit flexible by virtue of discourse motivations. In a study of narratives, Tonhauser & Colijn (2010) show that subjects are evenly distributed between the pre-and postverbal positions, but fail to identify clear motivations for this pattern. In this paper we address this issue by conducting an analysis of narratives from a predominantly inductive and qualitative viewpoint. We find that postverbal subjects fall into three classes: i) speakers of reporting sentences in direct speech, ii) antitopics in contexts of referential ambiguity, iii) focal referents in presentational sentences. Given that only the latter are valid for the analysis of constituent order, preverbal subjects are shown to outnumber postverbal ones. We also find that preverbal subjects have fewer information-structural restrictions, which along with their higher textual frequency leads us to characterize them as unmarked. Finally, we outline some diachronic and typological implications of our findings.