A Grammar of Enxet Sur
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2021
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University of Hawaii at Manoa
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Gramática enxet sur
Abstract
This is a reference grammar of Enxet Sur, an indigenous language of the Paraguayan Gran Chaco, and one of six recognized languages in the Enlhet-Enenlhet (EE, or Mascoyan) language family. This is the first comprehensive grammatical description of a language in the Enlhet-Enenlhet family, and is based on novel fieldwork by the author with Enxet Sur speakers, both in Paraguay and remotely, over a period from 2015 to 2020. This grammar also includes primary data from a number of other original Enxet Sur texts and audio recordings, translations of Spanish documents, an Enxet Sur/Spanish bilingual dictionary project, and historical descriptions and records of Enxet Sur. The grammatical topics in this description include the phonology of the language, descriptions of all major and minor word classes and their morphological structure, the tense-aspect-mood-evidentiality (tame) complex associated with predicates, the typologically interesting topical demonstratives, the structure of the clause, non-verbal predicates, the creation of complex structures through deverbal nominalization, and negation. This dissertation also includes two glossed interlinear texts, although much of the data are linked to open-access annotated recordings in the Endangered Languages Archive. Enxet Sur is a predicate-initial language with an otherwise pragmatically determined word order. Nominal predicates play an important role in the basic grammar of the language, as nominal expressions which reference the semantic arguments of verbs are often realized syntactically as the nominal predicates of independent clauses, instead of as nominal dependents of the verb. Furthemore, a highly productive process of grammatical deverbal nominalization is used for most complex sentence types. Thus, Enxet Sur presents some interesting deviations from cross-linguistic tendencies regarding the syntactic and functional behaviors of noun and verb word classes. The verbal morphology can be complex with extensive stem-forming morphology, which includes several verbal pluralizers in place of inflectional number agreement with arguments, a highly productive directional and associated motion system, and some typologically unusual valency manipulating morphology. Despite some degree of morphologicalcomplexity, Enxet Sur verbs only overtly indicate or cross-reference a single participant, typically with a nominative distribution, but with a very strong first person > non-first person selection hierarchy whose simplicity is a by-product of the fact that Enxet Sur pronominal morphology does not distinguish second and third persons. Along with the morphological complexity of verbs, Enxet Sur also displays a complex system of predicate tame clitics which can attach to words of almost any word class.
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