Reality across complex sentences in Mbya Guarani: towards an analysis of aguã as an irrealis nominalizer

Abstract

This paper focuses on a, ague and aguã nominalizations in Mbya Guarani (Tupi-Guarani), all of which can be used either as nucleus of NPs or as a complementation strategy, whereas aguã nominalizations also express purpose relations. In a previous work (Author 2022) it was suggested that, when coding purpose in Mbya, speakers may use a aguã nominalization if they lack knowledge regarding the accomplishment of the state-of-affairs (henceforth SoA) encoded by the nominalized predicate, as the language counts on another construction that triggers an accomplished purpose reading. This paper constitutes a follow-up to that previous work, where I offer a preliminary taxonomy of Mbya complement-taking predicates regarding the complements reality value in order to argue for an analysis of aguã as an irrealis nominalizer, the underlying preliminary hypothesis being that Mbya nominalizations encode different degrees of reality between realis and irrealis SoAs, where irrealis nominalizations, marked by aguã, subsume SoAs traditionally associated with an irrealis value, i.e. SoAs which are not acknowledged as realized by the speaker, potential SoAs that may take place in a future reference, and, in certain contexts, SoAs that failed to take place.