Repetitive in Paraguayan Guarani: semantics and grammaticalization path
The study is dedicated to the suffix of semelrepetitive (a specific type of pluractionality corresponding to repetition of original event at a single occasion) in modern Paraguayan Guarani. Various meanings conveyed by this suffix as well as by cognate morphemes and lexemes have been identified using data from a large collection of texts. A number of crosslinguistically unusual grammatical polysemy patterns are described. It is claimed that the semelrepetitive suffix -jevy- has grammaticalized from the verb meaning to return; a path of diachronic development of semelrepetitive and connected meanings is proposed which can be generalized to other languages as well.