Spanish in Contact with Other Languages
Embedded Files
SIUS 2025 with Brisa del Bosque
Here you will find information about my work on Spanish in contact with other languages.
Conference Presentations
Conference Presentations
Bittar Prieto, J., del Bosque, B., & Buck, M. (2025, November). “Todo un tema ko es”: ko as a pragmatic marker in Paraguayan Spanish and Guarani [Conference Presentation]. Hispanic Linguistics Symposium 2025, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, USA.
Abstract:
Contact research has shown that pragmatic markers are highly borrowable, both with form and function or with function alone (Matras, 2009). As a contact variety, Paraguayan Spanish features many of these borrowed markers. With the goal of describing its pragmatic as well as social functions, this study focuses on ko and its allomorphic variants, a Guarani-origin particle that is used in both Guarani and Spanish (Penner, Acosta, & Segovia, 2012). As a usage-based approach to language guides the present study, we extracted a total of 340 ko-including sentences from CEGPA (Corpus del Español y Guaraní Paraguayos de Asunción) (Author et al, 2024), a database of authentic naturalistic speech recordings with 14 speakers of Paraguayan Spanish (25,374 intonation units). Of these 14 speakers, seven also use Guarani during the interviews. Thus, we coded for the language of the utterance, the variant of ko, the pragmatic function, and social factors.
Overall, we found that ko in both Guarani and Spanish occurs in the second turn of an adjacency pair to mitigate a response of disagreement, to elaborate on evidence for a claim, to signal the end of a turn by providing a concluding statement, or to emphatically answer a question, among other functions. For example, in the following interaction, participant A is speaking about the process of professionally cutting fabric. Interviewer B asks if the process is done with scissors, and the participant’s negation includes ko to emphasize the impossibility of getting the job done with scissors instead of a machine.
A: se corta
con máquina es
B: no es con tijeras ¿verdad?
A: no
no ni nunca ko va a cortar dos mil prendas en un ratito
Our findings also show some uneven ko-usage across languages and speakers. For example, while the form ko accounts for only 59% of all the Guarani tokens (the remainder including the variants ngo, nio, niko, ningo), in Spanish this preference for ko increases to 94%, that is, the other variants are rarely used, pointing at the phonological differences between the languages. We also found that the codeswitchers used ko with various functions across both languages, with a total of 172 tokens in Spanish and 155 in Guarani. The non-codeswitchers (Spanish-only), however, rarely used the particle, with only 13 tokens among the 7 speakers. We interpret this social distribution as a possible priming effect of Guarani, but also as ko’s potential marker of socioeconomic status, as the codeswitchers live in the same underprivileged neighborhood while the non-codeswitchers come from more affluent areas.
This study adds to the previous work on language contact, contributing to our understanding of the borrowing of pragmatic markers from a substrate to a superstrate, in what other authors had described as a unique contact scenario in a nation-wide bilingual country (Gynan, 2011; Montrul, 2013).
References:
Bittar, J. (2023). Spanish loan verbs in Paraguayan Guaraní: Coexistence, replacement, or both? Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 16(2), 305–338. https://doi.org/10.1515/shll-2023-2012
Bittar, J., García Aceves, E., Powell, M., & Mereles, A. A. Z. (2022). Corpus del Español y Guaraní Paraguayos de Asunción (CEPGA) [Dataset]. California Language Archive, Survey of California and Other Indian Languages.
Cerno, L. (2010). Spanish articles in Correntinean Guaraní: A comparison with Paraguayan Guaraní. Language Typology and Universals, 63(1), 20–38. https://doi.org/10.1524/stuf.2010.0003
Cheng, W., & Warren, M. (2001). The Functions of Actually in a Corpus of Intercultural Conversations. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 6(2), 257–280. https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.6.2.04che
de Granda, G. (1988). Sociedad, historia y lengua en el Paraguay. Instituto Caro y Cuervo.
Döhla, H.-J., & Hennemann, A. (2024). Crossing Language Borders: The Case of Guaraní Markers in Paraguayan Spanish. Romanische Forschungen, 136(1), 3–35.
Estigarribia, B. (2020). A grammar of Paraguayan Guarani. UCL press.
Gynan, S. N. (2011). Spanish in contact with Guaraní. In M. Díaz‐Campos (Ed.), The Handbook of Hispanic Sociolinguistics (1st ed., pp. 355–373). Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444393446
Holguín Mendoza, C., Shappeck, M., & Ciriza, M. D. P. (2016). Vuelta en el español ecuatoriano y así en el español fronterizo mexicano: Usos subjetivos e intersubjetivos. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 9(2), 299–328. https://doi.org/10.1515/shll-2016-0013
Montrul, S. (2013). El bilingüismo en el mundo hispanohablante. John Wiley & Sons.
Penner, H., Acosta, S., & Segovia, M. (2012). El descubrimiento del castellano paraguayo a través del guaraní: Una historia de los enfoques lingüísticos. Centro de Estudios Antropológicos de la Universidad Católica (CEADUC).
Pešková, A. (2023). In the Echoes of Guarani: Exploring the Intonation of Statements in Paraguayan Spanish. Languages, 9(1), 12.
Roth‐Gordon, J. (2007). Youth, slang, and pragmatic expressions: Examples from Brazilian Portuguese1. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 11(3), 322–345. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9841.2007.00326.x
Tonhauser, J. (2011). The Paraguayan Guaraní future marker–ta: Formal semantics and cross-linguistic comparison. In R. Musan & M. Rathert (Eds.), Tense across Languages: (pp. 207–231). DE GRUYTER. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110267020
Bittar Prieto, J., Buck, M., & del Bosque, B. (2025, October 10). “Y así ko es”: ko as a pragmatic marker in Paraguayan Spanish and Guarani [Conference Presentation]. 54th Meeting of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest (LASSO), Wichita State University, Wichita, Kansas, USA.
Abstract:
Previous research has shown that pragmatic markers are highly borrowable in contact situations, both with form and function or with function alone (Matras, 2009). As a contact variety, Paraguayan Spanish features many of these borrowed markers. With the goal of describing pragmatic and social functions, this study focuses on ko and its allomorphic variants, a Guarani-origin particle that is used in both Guarani and Spanish (Penner, Acosta, and Segovia, 2012). As a usage-based approach to language guides the present study, we extracted a total of 340 ko-including sentences from CEGPA (Corpus del Español y Guaraní Paraguayos de Asunción) (Author et al, 2024), a database of authentic naturalistic speech recordings with 14 speakers of Paraguayan Spanish (25,374 intonation units). Of these 14 speakers, seven also use Guarani during the interviews. Thus, we coded for the language of the utterance, the variant of ko, the pragmatic function, and social factors.
Overall, we found that ko in both Guarani and Spanish occurs in responses as a way to mitigate a response of disagreement, to elaborate on evidence for a claim, to signal the end of a turn by providing a concluding statement, or to emphatically answer a question, among other functions. For example, in the following interaction, participant A is speaking about the process of professionally cutting fabric. Interviewer B asks if the process is done with scissors, and the participant’s negation includes ko to emphasize the impossibility of getting the job done with scissors instead of a machine.
A: se corta
con máquina es
B: no es con tijeras ¿verdad?
A: no
no ni nunca ko va a cortar dos mil prendas en un ratito
Our findings also show uneven ko-usage across languages and speakers. For example, while the form ko accounts for only 59% of all the Guarani tokens (the remainder including the variants ngo, nio, niko, ningo), in Spanish this preference for ko increases to 94%, that is, the other variants are rarely used, pointing at the phonological differences between the languages. We also found that the codeswitchers used ko with various functions across both languages, with a total of 172 tokens in Spanish and 155 in Guarani. The non-codeswitchers (Spanish-only), however, rarely used the particle, with only 13 tokens among the 7 speakers. We interpret this social distribution as a possible priming effect of Guarani, but also as ko’s potential marker of socioeconomic status, as the code-switchers live in the same underprivileged neighborhood while the non-code-switchers come from more affluent areas.
This study adds to the previous work on language contact, contributing to our understanding of the borrowing of pragmatic markers from a substrate to a superstrate, in what other authors had described as a unique contact scenario in a nation-wide bilingual country (Gynan, 2011; Montrul, 2013).
References:
Bittar, J. (2023). Spanish loan verbs in Paraguayan Guaraní: Coexistence, replacement, or both? Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 16(2), 305–338. https://doi.org/10.1515/shll-2023-2012
Bittar, J., García Aceves, E., Powell, M., & Mereles, A. A. Z. (2022). Corpus del Español y Guaraní Paraguayos de Asunción (CEPGA) [Dataset]. California Language Archive, Survey of California and Other Indian Languages.
Cerno, L. (2010). Spanish articles in Correntinean Guaraní: A comparison with Paraguayan Guaraní. Language Typology and Universals, 63(1), 20–38. https://doi.org/10.1524/stuf.2010.0003
Cheng, W., & Warren, M. (2001). The Functions of Actually in a Corpus of Intercultural Conversations. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 6(2), 257–280. https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.6.2.04che
de Granda, G. (1988). Sociedad, historia y lengua en el Paraguay. Instituto Caro y Cuervo.
Döhla, H.-J., & Hennemann, A. (2024). Crossing Language Borders: The Case of Guaraní Markers in Paraguayan Spanish. Romanische Forschungen, 136(1), 3–35.
Estigarribia, B. (2020). A grammar of Paraguayan Guarani. UCL press.
Gynan, S. N. (2011). Spanish in contact with Guaraní. In M. Díaz‐Campos (Ed.), The Handbook of Hispanic Sociolinguistics (1st ed., pp. 355–373). Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444393446
Holguín Mendoza, C., Shappeck, M., & Ciriza, M. D. P. (2016). Vuelta en el español ecuatoriano y así en el español fronterizo mexicano: Usos subjetivos e intersubjetivos. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 9(2), 299–328. https://doi.org/10.1515/shll-2016-0013
Montrul, S. (2013). El bilingüismo en el mundo hispanohablante. John Wiley & Sons.
Penner, H., Acosta, S., & Segovia, M. (2012). El descubrimiento del castellano paraguayo a través del guaraní: Una historia de los enfoques lingüísticos. Centro de Estudios Antropológicos de la Universidad Católica (CEADUC).
Pešková, A. (2023). In the Echoes of Guarani: Exploring the Intonation of Statements in Paraguayan Spanish. Languages, 9(1), 12.
Roth‐Gordon, J. (2007). Youth, slang, and pragmatic expressions: Examples from Brazilian Portuguese1. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 11(3), 322–345. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9841.2007.00326.x
Tonhauser, J. (2011). The Paraguayan Guaraní future marker–ta: Formal semantics and cross-linguistic comparison. In R. Musan & M. Rathert (Eds.), Tense across Languages: (pp. 207–231). DE GRUYTER. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110267020
Chávez, N., Buck, M., del Bosque, B. (2025, April 11). El “koísmo” en la variación del español paraguayo (“Koísmo” in the variation of Paraguayan Spanish) [Conference Presentation]. 29th Conference of Spanish in the United States and 14th Conference on Spanish in Contact with Other Languages, University of San Texas, San Antonio, San Antonio, Texas.
Abstract:
Para esta investigación analizamos el CEGPA: Corpus del Español y Guaraní Paraguayos en Asunción (Bittar et al. 2022) que contiene más de 25,000 enunciados de entrevistas a 14 hablantes del español paraguayo en la capital del país. Paraguay es un claro ejemplo de una situación de diglosia, donde cada lengua se usa en una situación social diferente: el español en situaciones formales u oficiales, y el guaraní en contextos informales (Bullock y Toribio, 2009).
Para este análisis se eliminaron los enunciados que eran hablados completamente en guaraní y solamente se codificaron los enunciados en español o en donde se realiza cambio de código entre ambas lenguas. Fue así que descubrimos el uso frecuente de “ko”. Después de leer las transcripciones del CEGPA, descubrimos que “ko” es usado como el demostrativo “este” en español, que puede ser usado también como un comodín (Vallejos-Yopán, 2023). Se codificaron las variables de: hablante, edad, barrio, uso de ko o este, función: demostrativo, comodín u otro, si los enunciados contenían cambio de código, y el número de ko o este usado en cada enunciado. Para este análisis cuantitativo se usó R (R’Core Team, 2023), RStudio (RStudio Team, 2023) y ggplot (Wickham, 2016). “Ko” es usado como un demostrativo próximo (Cerno, 2010), como marcador de énfasis (Estigarribia, 2020), y como una preposición en español (Péskova, 2024).
Encontramos 218 tokens de “ko” y 183 de “este”, sin incluir los vocablos del guaraní donde “ko” es un morfema. Concluimos que la variación del español de Paraguay, “ko” se usa más frecuentemente como un comodín (filler) que “este”. Vallejos-Yopán (2023) encontró que “este” se usa más frecuentemente como comodín que como demostrativo, en el español amazónico. Además, “este” es el comodín más usado en los países hispanoamericanos, de acuerdo a Vallejos-Yopán (2023). También encontramos que “ko” tiene otras funciones, además de demostrativo, intensificador y comodín, las cuales investigaremos en el futuro. El término “ko” es más usado que “este” por hablantes que realizan cambio de código más frecuentemente. El uso tan frecuente de “ko” es evidente que es consecuencia del contacto de lenguas entre el guaraní y el español, lo que hace a esta variación del español única e interesante.
References:
Bittar, J. (2023). Spanish loan verbs in Paraguayan Guaraní: Coexistence, replacement, or both? Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 16(2), 305–338. https://doi.org/10.1515/shll-2023-2012
Bittar, J., García Aceves, E., Powell, M., & Mereles, A. A. Z. (2022). Corpus del Español y Guaraní Paraguayos de Asunción (CEPGA). California Language Archive, Survey of California and Other Indian Languages.
Bullock, B. E. & Toribio, A. J. (2009). Themes in the study of code-switching. The Cambridge handbook of linguistic code-switching, 1.
Cerno, L. (2010). Spanish articles in Correntinean Guaraní: A comparison with Paraguayan Guaraní. Language Typology and Universals, 63(1), 20–38. https://doi.org/10.1524/stuf.2010.0003.
Döhla, H.-J., & Hennemann, A. (2024). Crossing Language Borders: The Case of Guaraní Markers in Paraguayan Spanish. Romanische Forschungen, 136(1), 3–35.
Erker, D., & Bruso, J. (2017). Uh, bueno, em…: Filled pauses as a site of contact-induced change in Boston Spanish. Language Variation and Change, 29(2), 205–244.
Estigarribia, B. (2020). A grammar of Paraguayan Guarani. UCL press.
Gynan, S. N. (2011). Spanish in contact with Guaraní. In M. Díaz‐Campos (Ed.), The Handbook of Hispanic Sociolinguistics (1st ed., pp. 355–373). Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444393446
Heine, B. (2013). On discourse markers: Grammaticalization, pragmaticalization, or something else? Linguistics, 51(6), 1205-1247.
Kany, Charles E. 1969. Sintaxis hispanoamericana. Madrid: Gredos.
Kawada, T. (2010). On the characteristics of three types of Japanese fillers: E-, ma-, and demonstrative-type fillers. DiSS-LPSS, 27–30.
Montrul, S. (2013). El bilingüismo en el mundo hispanohablante. John Wiley & Sons.
Pane, L. (2005). Los paraguayismos: El español en el habla cotidiana de los paraguayos (Vol. 1). Arandura Editorial.
Penner, H., Acosta, S., & Segovia, M. (2012). El descubrimiento del castellano paraguayo a través del guaraní: Una historia de los enfoques lingüísticos. Asunción: Centro de Estudios Antropológicos de la Universidad Católica (CEADUC).
Pešková, A. (2023). In the Echoes of Guarani: Exploring the Intonation of Statements in Paraguayan Spanish. Languages, 9(1), 12.
R Core Team. (2023). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing. https://www.R-project.org/
RStudio Team. (2023). RStudio: Integrated Development Environment for R. RStudio, PBC. http://www.rstudio.com/
Seongha, R. (2019). On Grammaticalization of Emphatic Discourse Markers. Chinese Social Science Forum of the CASS, The 10th Chinese Grammaticalization International Symposium, & Youth Forum on Grammaticalization. Yichang, China: China Three Gorges University.
Shin, N., & Yopán, R. V. (2023). Demostrativos y posesivos:(Demonstratives and Possessives). In G. Rojo, V. Vázquez, & R. T. Cacoullos (Eds.), Sintaxis del español/The Routledge handbook of Spanish syntax (pp. 427–440). Routledge.
Vallejos-Yopán, R. (2023). From demonstrative to filler: Este in Amazonian Spanish and beyond. Linguistics, 61(3), 651–678.
Wickham, H. (2016). ggplot2: Elegant graphics for data analysis. Springer-Verlag. https://ggplot2.tidyverse.org/
Zorraquino, M. Antonia, M. & Portolés,J. (1999). (1999). Los marcadores del discurso. In Ignacio Bosque & Violeta Demonte (eds.), Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española, 4051–4213. Madrid: Espasa Calpe.
Buck, M., del Bosque, B., & Chávez, N. (2025, April 4). El “koísmo” en la variación del español Paraguayo (“Koísmo” in the variation of Paraguayan Spanish) [Conference Presentation]. The 5th Convocation of the Querencias Conference, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Abstract:
Para esta investigación analizamos el CEGPA: Corpus del Español y Guaraní Paraguayos en Asunción (Bittar et al. 2022) que contiene más de 25,000 enunciados de entrevistas a 14 hablantes del español paraguayo en la capital del país. Paraguay es un claro ejemplo de una situación de diglosia, donde cada lengua se usa en una situación social diferente: el español en situaciones formales u oficiales, y el guaraní en contextos informales (Bullock y Toribio, 2009).
Para este análisis se eliminaron los enunciados que eran hablados completamente en guaraní y solamente se codificaron los enunciados en español o en donde se realiza cambio de código entre ambas lenguas. Fue así que descubrimos el uso frecuente de “ko”. Después de leer las transcripciones del CEGPA, descubrimos que “ko” es usado como el demostrativo “este” en español, que puede ser usado también como un comodín (Vallejos-Yopán, 2023). Se codificaron las variables de: hablante, edad, barrio, uso de ko o este, función: demostrativo, comodín u otro, si los enunciados contenían cambio de código, y el número de ko o este usado en cada enunciado. Para este análisis cuantitativo se usó R (R’Core Team, 2023), RStudio (RStudio Team, 2023) y ggplot (Wickham, 2016). “Ko” es usado como un demostrativo próximo (Cerno, 2010), como marcador de énfasis (Estigarribia, 2020), y como una preposición en español (Péskova, 2024).
Encontramos 218 tokens de “ko” y 183 de “este”, sin incluir los vocablos del guaraní donde “ko” es un morfema. Concluimos que la variación del español de Paraguay, “ko” se usa más frecuentemente como un comodín (filler) que “este”. Vallejos-Yopán (2023) encontró que “este” se usa más frecuentemente como comodín que como demostrativo, en el español amazónico. Además, “este” es el comodín más usado en los países hispanoamericanos, de acuerdo a Vallejos-Yopán (2023). También encontramos que “ko” tiene otras funciones, además de demostrativo, intensificador y comodín, las cuales investigaremos en el futuro. El término “ko” es más usado que “este” por hablantes que realizan cambio de código más frecuentemente. El uso tan frecuente de “ko” es evidente que es consecuencia del contacto de lenguas entre el guaraní y el español, lo que hace a esta variación del español única e interesante.
References:
Bittar, J. (2023). Spanish loan verbs in Paraguayan Guaraní: Coexistence, replacement, or both? Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, 16(2), 305–338. https://doi.org/10.1515/shll-2023-2012
Bittar, J., García Aceves, E., Powell, M., & Mereles, A. A. Z. (2022). Corpus del Español y Guaraní Paraguayos de Asunción (CEPGA). California Language Archive, Survey of California and Other Indian Languages.
Bullock, B. E. & Toribio, A. J. (2009). Themes in the study of code-switching. The Cambridge handbook of linguistic code-switching, 1.
Cerno, L. (2010). Spanish articles in Correntinean Guaraní: A comparison with Paraguayan Guaraní. Language Typology and Universals, 63(1), 20–38. https://doi.org/10.1524/stuf.2010.0003.
Döhla, H.-J., & Hennemann, A. (2024). Crossing Language Borders: The Case of Guaraní Markers in Paraguayan Spanish. Romanische Forschungen, 136(1), 3–35.
Erker, D., & Bruso, J. (2017). Uh, bueno, em…: Filled pauses as a site of contact-induced change in Boston Spanish. Language Variation and Change, 29(2), 205–244.
Estigarribia, B. (2020). A grammar of Paraguayan Guarani. UCL press.
Gynan, S. N. (2011). Spanish in contact with Guaraní. In M. Díaz‐Campos (Ed.), The Handbook of Hispanic Sociolinguistics (1st ed., pp. 355–373). Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444393446
Heine, B. (2013). On discourse markers: Grammaticalization, pragmaticalization, or something else? Linguistics, 51(6), 1205-1247.
Kany, Charles E. 1969. Sintaxis hispanoamericana. Madrid: Gredos.
Kawada, T. (2010). On the characteristics of three types of Japanese fillers: E-, ma-, and demonstrative-type fillers. DiSS-LPSS, 27–30.
Montrul, S. (2013). El bilingüismo en el mundo hispanohablante. John Wiley & Sons.
Pane, L. (2005). Los paraguayismos: El español en el habla cotidiana de los paraguayos (Vol. 1). Arandura Editorial.
Penner, H., Acosta, S., & Segovia, M. (2012). El descubrimiento del castellano paraguayo a través del guaraní: Una historia de los enfoques lingüísticos. Asunción: Centro de Estudios Antropológicos de la Universidad Católica (CEADUC).
Pešková, A. (2023). In the Echoes of Guarani: Exploring the Intonation of Statements in Paraguayan Spanish. Languages, 9(1), 12.
R Core Team. (2023). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing. https://www.R-project.org/
RStudio Team. (2023). RStudio: Integrated Development Environment for R. RStudio, PBC. http://www.rstudio.com/
Seongha, R. (2019). On Grammaticalization of Emphatic Discourse Markers. Chinese Social Science Forum of the CASS, The 10th Chinese Grammaticalization International Symposium, & Youth Forum on Grammaticalization. Yichang, China: China Three Gorges University.
Shin, N., & Yopán, R. V. (2023). Demostrativos y posesivos:(Demonstratives and Possessives). In G. Rojo, V. Vázquez, & R. T. Cacoullos (Eds.), Sintaxis del español/The Routledge handbook of Spanish syntax (pp. 427–440). Routledge.
Vallejos-Yopán, R. (2023). From demonstrative to filler: Este in Amazonian Spanish and beyond. Linguistics, 61(3), 651–678.
Wickham, H. (2016). ggplot2: Elegant graphics for data analysis. Springer-Verlag. https://ggplot2.tidyverse.org/
Zorraquino, M. Antonia, M. & Portolés,J. (1999). (1999). Los marcadores del discurso. In Ignacio Bosque & Violeta Demonte (eds.), Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española, 4051–4213. Madrid: Espasa Calpe.
Poster Presentations
Poster Presentations
Buck, M., del Bosque, B., & Bittar Prieto, J. (2025, November). Ko as a pragmatic marker in Paraguay: The Sociolinguistic Dimensions of Language Contact [Poster Presentation]. New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV) 53, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, online.
Abstract:
Despite Paraguay having a unique bilingual landscape, Paraguayan Spanish and Guaraní remain to be underrepresented in sociolinguistic research (Author, 2023; Gynan, 2011; Montrul, 2013). This study centers on the Guaraní-origin pragmatic particle ko, and its allomorphic variants (e.g., ngo, nio, niko, ningo), which appear in both Guaraní and Spanish (Penner, Acosta, & Segovia, 2012). We aim to understand how pragmatic markers function in language-contact scenarios as they are highly borrowable and socially salient (Matras, 2009).
Utilizing a usage-based approach to language variation, we analyzed 340 tokens from ko-inclusive sentences drawn from the CEGPA (Corpus del Español y Guaraní Paraguayos de Asunción) (Author et al., 2024), which consists of naturalistic speech from 14 Spanish speakers in Paraguay’s capital, Asunción (25,374 intonation units). Seven of the speakers also used during their interviews, allowing us to explore not only cross-linguistic variation, but also speaker variation.
Overall, we found that ko in both Guarani and Spanish occurs in the second turn of an adjacency pair to mitigate a response of disagreement, to elaborate on evidence for a claim, to signal the end of a turn by providing a concluding statement, or to emphatically answer a question, among other functions. For example, in the following interaction, Participant A is speaking about the process of professionally cutting fabric. Interviewer B asks if the process is done with scissors, and the participant’s negation includes ko to emphasize the impossibility of getting the job done with scissors instead of a machine.
A: se corta … con máquina es
B: no es con tijeras ¿verdad?
A: no … no ni nunca ko va a cortar dos mil prendas en un ratito
We also found considerable social asymmetries in ko usage. While the variant ko accounts for 59% of all Guaraní tokens, its dominance is even more evident in Spanish where it represented 94% of the tokens. Nearly all tokens of ko and its allomorphs came from bilingual speakers labelled as “codeswitchers” - who produced 172 tokens in Spanish and all 155 tokens in Guaraní. In contrast, only the remaining 13 tokens of ko and its variants were used by the non-codeswitchers in Spanish. This discrepancy underscores ko’s potential as a socially marked feature, linked not only to Guaraní priming but also to class and neighborhood— all codeswitchers live in the same underprivileged area, Bañado Sur, while non-switchers come from more affluent contexts.
This study contributes to our understanding of pragmatic markers in language contact, especially in contexts where historically marginalized languages like Guaraní influence dominant varieties like Spanish.
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