"Así lo que me gusta": notas sobre la interfaz sintaxis-pragmática en el español paraguayo

In this paper we analyse a peculiar structure in Paraguayan Spanish, such as Así lo que me gusta or ¿Quién lo que llora? These are constructions related to Focus, which do not exist in other European and American varieties, and have the pragmatic goal of emphasizing one phrase, following the "clefting strategy" (i.e., by means of the separation of two elements with the invariable form lo que). In order to analyse these Paraguayan Spanish constructions, we contrast them with general Spanish clefts and pseudoclefts (Fue Eva quien llamó / Eva fue quien llamó / Quien llamó fue Eva) and with «que galicado» constructions (Ahí es que nos vamos a reunir, Fue Juan que lo dijo). We also compare the lo que structures with the similar data in Guarani, a language with which Paraguayan Spanish has an intense contact because of the present bilingualism and the long coexistence in the same area. We base our analysis in the classical Rizzi's (1997) work, that decompose Complementizer Phrase into three basic projections related to the informational structure of the sentence: Focus Phrase, Topic Phrase and Force Phrase (related to the semantic type of clause).