Reduplication in Paraguayan Guaraní: a descriptive account

Abstract

This thesis presents a primarily descriptive account of the structural and meaning properties of verb and numeral reduplication in Paraguayan Guaraní, a Tupí-Guaraní language spoken by about four million people mainly in Paraguay. Based on data collected through elicitation sessions with three consultants, I demonstrate that Guaraní exhibits both patterns of total (root) and partial (disyllabic) reduplication. I will also show that this disyllabic pattern of copying is in fact due to the presence of a prosodic constraint of disyllabicity which applies to the entire reduplication system of Guaraní. In terms of their meaning properties, Guaraní reduplicative forms are mostly associated with such iconic notions as iterativity, continuity, multiplicity and distributivity. Despite the semantic regularity of Guaraní reduplicated structures from a crosslinguistic perspective, there are aspects of their form which pose challenges to templatic accounts of reduplication. A brief discussion of some of these issues concludes this work.