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Projection variability in Paraguayan Guaraní

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Abstract

Projective content is heterogeneous, with classes of projective content differing in several properties (e.g., Potts 2005; Tonhauser et al. 2013). Recently, Tonhauser et al. (2018) found that projective content in English varies in its projectivity both between and within classes, and also that there is by-participant and by-lexical content projection variability. This paper shows that projection variability is not unique to English but also attested in Paraguayan Guaraní, a Tupí-Guaraní language that is genetically unrelated to and typologically different from English. This finding suggests that projection variability may be a cross-linguistically universal property of projective content. The comparison of English and Paraguayan Guaraní also reveals parallels in how projective the content associated with a translation pair is. This finding strengthens the empirical support for the position that some projective content is nondetachable (e.g., Levinson and Annamalai 1992; Simons 2001; Abrusán 2011, 2016; Tonhauser et al. 2013). The paper discusses implications for analyses of projective content, which differ in whether they lead us to expect projection variability and cross-linguistic similarities in projection variability. The paper also addresses methodological considerations in exploring projection variability in fieldwork-based research.

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Notes

  1. Paraguayan Guaraní, which is spoken by about five million people in Paraguay, is a mildly polysynthetic, agglutinative and head-marking language with a split-S argument marking system. Word order is relatively free and influenced by information structure. For overviews of the grammar see, e.g., Gregores and Suárez (1967), Velázquez-Castillo (2004a) and Estigarribia (2017).

  2. The colors were chosen to maximize accessibility for readers with color vision deficiencies. The full-color paper is available online.

  3. English see and hear are taken to be factive when the complement describes an event that can be seen or heard, respectively, and non-factive/evidential otherwise. The CCs of -hecha ‘see’ and -hendu ‘hear’ are assigned to different classes here because -hecha ‘see’ was combined with complements that described an event that can be seen whereas -hendu ‘hear’ was combined with complements that described an event that cannot be heard.

  4. Paraguayan Guaraní examples are given in the standardized orthography of the language used in Paraguay (Velázquez-Castillo 2004b), except that all postpositions are suffixed to their host. Following this orthography, stressed oral syllables are marked with an acute accent and stressed nasal syllables are marked with a tilde; acute accents are not written for normally accented words, which have stress on the final syllable. I use glosses specified in the Leipzig Glossing Rules and the following additional glosses: A/B = set A/B cross-reference marker, ag = agentive, je = reflexive/passive marker, nom.term = nominal terminative aspect, nonag = non-agentive, pe = (in)direct object and locative marker, pron = pronoun, prosp = prospective aspect.

  5. This quote has been altered slightly to match the spelling conventions and the terminology used in the current paper.

  6. Some of the verbs that can take a clausal complement with =ha ‘nmlz’ can also take a clausal complement without. What governs the distribution of =ha ‘nmlz’ is a question for future research.

  7. The native speakers of Paraguayan Guaraní that participated in the work reported in this paper were fluent in Paraguayan Guaraní and Spanish (on bilingualism in Paraguay see, e.g., von Gleich 1993; Fasoli-Wörmann 2002; Stewart 2017). The contexts and response questions were presented in Spanish. For discussions of considerations that go into which language to use in research on languages one does not speak natively see Matthewson 2004 and AnderBois and Henderson 2015.

  8. I presented the native speaker with utterances of sentences describing 34 lexical contents and asked them to identify any that seem much more likely or unlikely than others. A couple of lexical contents were replaced based on this speaker’s feedback.

  9. These recordings as well as the data and the R code for generating the figures and analyses presented in this paper are available at https://github.com/judith-tonhauser/guarani-variability.

  10. A model with random slopes for expression by participant did not converge. A model that included the interaction of expression and block order was not significantly better than reported model, suggesting that the order in which participants completed the task did not influence their responses.

  11. Projection variability can also be compared by investigating which expression/content pairs are statistically significantly different from one another across two languages. This avenue is not pursued here because the data collected in the pilot study in Sect. 2.2 were not subjected to statistical analysis and because of the difference in power between the experiment in Sect. 2.3 and the experiments in Tonhauser et al. 2018. Preliminary evidence for similarities in projection variability comes, however, from the observation that the contents associated with NRRCs and possessive noun phrases in both languages were more projective than the contents associated with the change-of-state expression/stop, =nte ‘only’/only and -juhu ‘discover’ / discover (though the latter was marginal in Paraguayan Guaraní for NRRCs).

  12. Future research needs to determine what such differences are due to. One possibility is that such differences are due to the lexical contents of the items used in the experiment and in Tonhauser et al. (2018). Another possibility is that the truth conditional content and/or discourse use of -mombe’u ‘confess, tell’ and confess are different.

  13. The correlation also holds for the 11 expression/content pairs coded as presuppositions, again regardless of whether the projection means come from the pilot (\(r_{\mathrm{s}}= .633\), n = 11, p = .036) or the experiment (\(r_{\mathrm{s}}= .624\), n = 11, p = .04).

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the native speakers of Paraguayan Guaraní who worked with me on this project, including Ansia Sabina Maciel de Cantero, Evelin Leonor Jara Cespedes, Jeremias Ezequiel Sanabria O., Marité Maldonado, Perla Valdéz de Ferreira, Ricardo Aranda Locio, Robert Ariel Barreto Villalba and Vicky Barreto. For helpful comments on the work reported on here, I thank Judith Degen, Amy Rose Deal, the anonymous reviewers for Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, as well as audiences at the University of California in Los Angeles and in San Diego, and at the 2019 Experimental Pragmatics conference in Edinburgh. Finally, I gratefully acknowledge research support from the National Science Foundation grants BCS-0952571 and BCS-1452674.

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  1. The Ohio State University, Columbus, USA

    Judith Tonhauser

  2. Stuttgart University, Stuttgart, Germany

    Judith Tonhauser

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Appendices

Appendix A: Examples used in one-on-one elicitation

This appendix provides the unembedded sentences from which the Family-of-Sentences variants were formed for the investigation described in Sect. 2.1 as well as the English translations of the response questions in the direct and indirect implication response tasks that the participants were asked. Only the examples not yet discussed in Sect. 2.1 are given.

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Appendix B: Experiment stimuli

The experiment stimuli were recordings of the sentences in (26) to (28). The recordings can be found in the GitHub repository mentioned in fn. 9. Each example also identifies the content whose projectivity was explored by providing the clausal complement of the response question Según lo que preguntó Magda, que certeza tiene de que...? ‘According to what Magda asked, is she certain that...?’.

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Appendix C: Experiment blocks A and B

Table A.1 shows the order of the items in blocks A and B in the experiment reported on in Sect. 2.3. The items are identified by the labels in (26) to (28) above.

Table A.1 Items in blocks A and B
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Tonhauser, J. Projection variability in Paraguayan Guaraní. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 38, 1263–1302 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-019-09462-x

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