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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:MWU.1993/23201 |
| Date | 13 January 2014 |
| Creators | Hamidzadeh, Khashayar |
| Contributors | Russell, Kevin (Linguistics), Ghomeshi, Jila (Linguistics) Fernandez, Enrique (French, Spanish and Italian) |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Detected Language | English |
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