Abstrakt
This paper presents the preliminary results of a multifactorial analysis of word order in Mbyá
Guaraní, a Tupí-Guaraní language spoken in Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay, based on a corpusof written narratives with multiple layers of annotation. Our goals are to assess the validityof previous claims about Mbyá word order (Martins, 2003; Dooley, 1982; Dooley, 2015), andto explore the effects of different types of factors on the position of core arguments relative totheir verb. We show that SV and VO are the most frequently attested orders in matrix clausesand that subordinate clauses favour the OV order. Givenness, transitivity and clause type (rootvs subordinate) are found to be significant predictors of word order. We identify differencesin object position between Mbyá and Paraguayan Guaraní (Tonhauser and Colijn, 2010), andwe argue that these differences support Dietrich (2009)’s proposal that Tupí-Guaraní languagesare undergoing a change in word order from OV to VO, induced by contact with Spanish and
Portuguese.