A diachronic account of exceptional progressive nasalization patterns in guarani causatives

Nasal harmony in Paraguayan Guarani spreads mostly leftward in a morphological word. This regressive nasalization is triggered by a phonologically nasal consonant or stressed nasal vowel and does not affect voiceless stops. A limited process of progressive nasalization affects morpheme-initial voiceless stops across a morpheme boundary. Many forms that include a causative prefix show this kind of progressive nasalization. However, this nasal spread lacks any obvious nasal trigger and does not occur consistently. In this paper, I propose an explanation of these cases as vestiges of earlier phonological rules from pre-Proto-Tupi-Guarani but not active in Paraguayan Guarani, followed by the emergence of a regressive oralization rule and ending in a reanalysis of the basic form of the causative prefix. In so doing, I will provide a revised sequence of changes involving contour allophones in the reconstruction of Proto-Tupi-Guarani (PTG)

A biclausal account of clitic left-dislocations with epithets in Rioplatense Spanish

Clitic Left-Dislocations with Epithets in Rioplatense Spanish (CLLD+ep) are sentences with three apparently co-referential direct object constituents: a clitic-left-dislocated topic DP (DP-LD), a clitic (CL) and a post-verbal epithet (DP-ep). Previous studies have proposed that the DP-ep is licensed in-situ as Clitic Doubling and the DP-LD base-generated, or that the DP-ep and the DP-LD are licensed together in a predicative small clause doubled by the clitic. However, data where the DP-LD and the CL are singular but co-occur with a plural DP-ep cast doubt on previous analyses. Here, I explore an analysis of CLLD+ep as an underlyingly biclausal structure subject to deletions. The biclausal structure allows a plural epithet to refer to the plural restrictor set of a syntactically singular quantifier in a previous clause

The semantics of Spanish Clitic Left Dislocations with epithets

Rioplatense Spanish Clitic Left Dislocations with epithets contain a left-dislocated direct object DP, an in situ direct object epithet DP, and a direct object clitic, all three apparently referring to the same event participant. Previous proposals have focused on syntactic licensing mechanisms but how the epithet's meaning is integrated in the sentence has not been addressed. We assume a multi-propositional framework to first show that these sentences encode two propositions, one at-issue (asserted) and one not-At-issue (non-Asserted). The content of the epithet is absent from the at-issue proposition and is interpreted as a main semantic predicate in the not-At-issue proposition. Furthermore, we argue that this not-At-issue predication is best understood as a conventional implicature. Second, the epithet has been assumed to (unproblematically) pick up the left-dislocated DP as subject of predication. However, with quantified DPs and in intensional contexts the subject of predication may be different from the left-dislocated DP. The behavior of the epithet in these cases is shown to be similar to the behavior of pronouns in intersentential anaphora, thus suggesting that the syntax of this construction is underlyingly biclausal

A speech planning account of Guarani grammatical borrowings in Paraguayan Spanish

Previous studies view the use of Guarani grammatical morphemes in Paraguayan Spanish simply as grammatical borrowings (if one focuses on the morphosyntactic status of mixed forms) or as an ill-defined "interference". But so far there has been no examination of the bilingual planning mechanisms that license and constrain these language mixes. In this paper, I explore the idea that the emergence of grammatical borrowings can be explained by message conceptualization procedures that are influenced by asymmetries in each language's cognitive dominance. This work thus contributes to our understanding of language contact by applying what we know about language processing and utterance planning to explaining the outcomes observed in language mixing. In so doing, I hope to facilitate a tighter integration between the psycholinguistic planning and language contact literatures

Guarani morphology in Paraguayan Spanish: Insights from code-mixing typology

In this paper we examine the use of Guarani affixes and clitics in colloquial Paraguayan Spanish. We depart from the traditional view of these as "borrowings," and instead explore the idea that these phenomena can be integrated within Muysken's (2000, 2013, 2014) typology of code-mixing. We claim that most of these uses may stem from a strategy of backflagging that bilingual speakers employ to mark their use of a (historical, colonial) L2 (Spanish) with elements from the original community L1 (Guarani). In so doing, however, we identify some problematic areas in applying Muysken's model to these data. We conclude by showing how this perspective shift in the analysis of Guarani-Spanish contact phenomena can both increase our understanding of this particular contact situation, as well as of code-mixing typology

Guaraní-Spanish Jopara mixing in a Paraguayan novel: Does it reflect a third language, a language variety, or true codeswitching?

We study the highly idiosyncratic case of Paraguay, the only American nation where an indigenous language has survived as a majority language spoken by the non-indigenous population. Jopara is the name of the commonly used code that mixes Guaraní and Spanish. Characterizations of Jopara in the literature are inconclusive. Some authors call it a variety of Spanish, some a variety of Guaraní, others a new mixed language. The choice of one characterization over the other has important implications for the status of Guaraní vis-à-vis Spanish, especially for Paraguay's educational and language planning. Here we analyze Jopara as it is represented in the novel Ramona Quebranto (RQ-Jopara). We show that this written code is not a variety of either Spanish or Guaraní, nor a mixed language. Rather, it reflects properties of true code-switching. It displays both insertional and alternational characteristics (Muysken, 2000), as well as evidence of a composite matrix language (Myers-Scotton, 2002). We conclude by suggesting RQ-Jopara fits best a "mixed lect" scenario (Backus, 2003) and discussing generalization to spoken Jopara

Analyzing the structure of code-switched written texts, Linguistic variation

As more written language data become available, the interest in written language mixing / codeswitching (LM/CS) is increasing (Sebba, Mahootian & Jonsson 2012; Sebba 2013). LM/CS in non-naturalistic (e.g., literary) texts raises issues related to gauging (1) the authenticity and representativity of a textual corpus, and deciding (2) whether categories/mechanisms of spoken LM/CS apply to written LM/CS. We focus on Guarani-Spanish LM/CS (Jopara) as represented in the Paraguayan novel Ramona Quebranto (RQ). We apply the framework of Muysken (1997; 2000; 2013), developed as a taxonomy of spoken LM/CS. Our contribution extends its applicability to written LM/CS. We show that Jopara has a mix of insertional and backflagging strategies, with infrequent alternations

Lessons from the English auxiliary system

The English auxiliary system exhibits many lexical exceptions and subregularities, and considerable dialectal variation, all of which are frequently omitted from generative analyses and discussions. This paper presents a detailed, movement-free account of the English Auxiliary System within Sign-Based Construction Grammar (Sag 2010, Michaelis 2011, Boas & Sag 2012) that utilizes techniques of lexicalist and construction-based analysis. The resulting conception of linguistic knowledge involves constraints that license hierarchical structures directly (as in context-free grammar), rather than by appeal to mappings over such structures. This allows English auxiliaries to be modeled as a class of verbs whose behavior is governed by general and class-specific constraints. Central to this account is a novel use of the feature aux, which is set both constructionally and lexically, allowing for a complex interplay between various grammatical constraints that captures a wide range of exceptional patterns, most notably the vexing distribution of unstressed do, and the fact that Ellipsis can interact with other aspects of the analysis to produce the feeding and blocking relations that are needed to generate the complex facts of EAS. The present approach, superior both descriptively and theoretically to existing transformational approaches, also serves to undermine views of the biology of language and acquisition such as Berwick et al. (2011), which are centered on mappings that manipulate hierarchical phrase structures in a structure-dependent fashion

Clonal chromosomal mosaicism and loss of chromosome Y in elderly men increase vulnerability for SARS-CoV-2

The pandemic caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2, COVID-19) had an estimated overall case fatality ratio of 1.38% (pre-vaccination), being 53% higher in males and increasing exponentially with age. Among 9578 individuals diagnosed with COVID-19 in the SCOURGE study, we found 133 cases (1.42%) with detectable clonal mosaicism for chromosome alterations (mCA) and 226 males (5.08%) with acquired loss of chromosome Y (LOY). Individuals with clonal mosaic events (mCA and/or LOY) showed a 54% increase in the risk of COVID-19 lethality. LOY is associated with transcriptomic biomarkers of immune dysfunction, pro-coagulation activity and cardiovascular risk. Interferon-induced genes involved in the initial immune response to SARS-CoV-2 are also down-regulated in LOY. Thus, mCA and LOY underlie at least part of the sex-biased severity and mortality of COVID-19 in aging patients. Given its potential therapeutic and prognostic relevance, evaluation of clonal mosaicism should be implemented as biomarker of COVID-19 severity in elderly people. Among 9578 individuals diagnosed with COVID-19 in the SCOURGE study, individuals with clonal mosaic events (clonal mosaicism for chromosome alterations and/or loss of chromosome Y) showed an increased risk of COVID-19 lethality