[-Person] Direct Object Drop: The Genetic Cause of a Synthactic Feature in Paraguayan Spanish

Omission of impersonal direct object has been observed in Spanish spoken in Paraguay. This linguistic phenomenon has been previously analyzed as a result of direct transfer from a similar syntactic feature of Guaraní, the language with which Spanish has coexisted for more than four centuries in Para...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Hispania 2000-09, Vol.83 (3), p.531-543
Main Author: Choi, Jinny K.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Censuses
Formal education
Historical linguistics
Language
Language contact
Linguistic substrata
Questionnaires
Syntactics
Theoretical linguistics
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Summary:Omission of impersonal direct object has been observed in Spanish spoken in Paraguay. This linguistic phenomenon has been previously analyzed as a result of direct transfer from a similar syntactic feature of Guaraní, the language with which Spanish has coexisted for more than four centuries in Paraguay. Nevertheless, the data collected indicated that the omission of [-person] direct object clitics is present in the speech of all socio-educational classes, among both bilinguals and monolingual Spanish speakers. Additionally, the occurrence of the same phenomenon in other regional varieties of Spanish, as well as another Romance language and its dialect proves that the external explanation, namely Guaraní substratum theory, cannot be the only genetic cause behind the origin of this phenomenon.
ISSN:0018-2133
DOI:10.2307/346046