A Speech Planning Account of Guarani Grammatical Borrowings in Paraguayan Spanish

Abstract

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.