A GRAMMAR OF ENXET SUR DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI‘I AT MANOA¯ IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN LINGUISTICS May 2021 by John A. Elliott Dissertation Committee: Lyle Campbell, Chairperson Patience Epps Gary Holton William O’Grady Alexander Mawyer Acknowledgements Completing a project like this involves a huge amount collaboration and support, and there are many people and institutions to thank. First, I would like express my gratitude for being able to live and learn on the mokupuni of O‘ahu. My work and my life have benefited not just from the mountains and forests and waters here but also from having opportunities to learn about them from Indigenous perspectives. I would like to thank the Endangered Language Documentation Project (ELDP), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the Bilinski Foundation for funding this research. Funding for research on underdocumented and endangered languages is not exactly abun- dant, and I am grateful for the support this work has received thus far. As an academic work, this dissertation has been made possible through lots of help and support from my dissertation committee and the faculty at the UH Mnoa linguis- tics department. Many thanks are in order to my advisor, Lyle Campbell, for all of the information he has shared and advice he has given me over the years, but also for his en- couragement and faith in my ability to succeed in completing a project like this. I am also grateful to the other linguists on my dissertation committee, Gary Holton and Patience Epps for their commentary and helpful, insightful suggestions on my own data and on language description in general, and especially to William O’Grady who has been of great assistance in helping me turn this description from a tool for my own understanding to something of greater use and interest to other linguists. The remaining shortcomings of this dissertation are entirely my own fault, and any successes are the product of the training and support I have received from the committee and the linguistics department faculty. I must also thank Alex Mawyer for his participation in this process as the uni- versity representative, and for being so delightful to interact with. Many thanks to Jen Kanda and John Kawahara for all of their administrative help. Thanks as well to my fellow enlhetologxs, Raina Heaton and Jens van Gysel, for sharing data and providing insights from other Enlhet-Enenlhet languages — there’s so much more to learn. Most importantly, I must thank all of the Enxet Sur people of El Estribo who I’ve worked and lived with over several visits since 2015. More than anyone, I must thank Aníbal López, who is a passionate ambassador for his culture, extremely funny, and a role model of leadership I hope to emulate some day. His wife Lydia has been incredibly hospitable and kind to me, as has the rest of Aníbal’s family, Lina, Derlis, Majora, Nilda, Wilma, Delio, and Nico. I am grateful for Teófilo Gomez’s endless stories, and his com- panionship on long hot days when the most logical thing to do was sit under a tree and do nothing with him. Cirilo Benítez is an excellent historian and his amicable attitude is what brought me back to El Estribo in the first place. Asunción Rojas has been critical i to this work, and I think this would be a very different language description without his expertise and patience with the difficult and sometimes mind-melting art of translation. Among many people in El Estribo who have helped me out, taught me their language, and shown me hospitality and companionship, I must especially thank Nenito Rojas, Ceferino Sosa, Cirila Benítez, Mario Benítez, Mendoza Gomez, and Fidel Gomez. I look forward to returning to El Estribo soon, and in finding more ways to make the linguistic insights developed during this project useful for the community and its language planning goals. Along with the lovely people of El Estribo, this work was made possible by a network of support from other folks I have had the pleasure of knowing and working with in Paraguay. I am grateful to Hannes Kalisch and Timothy Curtis, not only because their work as community-oriented linguists and language documentarians have been a major contribution to this dissertation, but also because both have been incredibly hospitable and welcoming to me over several years of trips to the Chaco. I thank them both for their insights and riveting discussions of the linguistics of Enlhet-Enenlhet languages based on their decades of lived experience in these communities. I don’t know that any of this work would have gotten started without the help of Rodrigo Villagra Carron and the folks at Tierraviva who first took me to Makxawaya and El Estribo, and similarly I thank Lone Scheck and Oleg Visokólan for helping me make connections in Asunción, and for their lovely respite in Lambaré. I had numerous insightful and helpful conversations with Nieves Montiel at the Directora General de Documentación y Promoción de Lenguas Indígenas, and am impressed and hopeful about the work that they do. I am also grateful for Nicolas Gynan and his effervescent texts of positivity while I was in deep in imposter syndrome during my first long fieldwork trip. On a personal level, I must thank my family for their endless support. I thank my dad for encouraging my intellectual curiosity, my mom for teaching me to be comfortable around people who are different from me, and my grandmother Norma for teaching me to be patient and not worry too much. Thanks to my brother Zach for picking a more lucrative career, and my grandmother Ruth for tolerating me living six time zones away. Thanks to all my friends here in Hawai’i and around the US who’ve encouraged me along the way and made my time in this degree more enjoyable: Jangel, Kavon, Catherine, Brad, Mihoko, Amber, Colleen, Sam, Ryan(s), Andrew, Anna, Amanda, Dannii, Thomas, Jacob, and Michelle. I also want to thank all of the great language teachers I’ve had the good fortune of having over my life: Fidencio Briceño Chel, Brigette Woloszyn, Ismael May May, Priza Marendraputra and Irma Nurkimah, Philip Kezorifa Waisen, Kaliko Baker, Lalepa Koga, and Yoko Brandt, among others. Thank you to David Mora-Marín for telling me to go to Yucatán, that was a good idea. And thanks to all of the 100-level students here at UH Manoa¯ and the kids I’ve tutored at Elite School over the last many years who remind me that your great ideas don’t mean much if no one understands you. To Minjun, yes, I finished my bedtime story. Finally, to Zoë, whose support and love has been more important to getting this damn thing done than anything else, I love you. I promise to never do another PhD again. Let’s go get in the water. ii To Teófilo, for remembering and to Norma, for walking with me 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 typolog- ically interesting topical demonstratives, the structure of the clause, non-verbal predi- cates, 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 lan- guage, as nominal expressions which reference the semantic arguments of verbs are of- ten realized syntactically as the nominal predicates of independent clauses, instead of as nominal dependents of the verb. Furthemore, a highly productive process of gram- matical 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 ty- pologically unusual valency manipulating morphology. Despite some degree of morpho- logical complexity, Enxet Sur verbs only overtly indicate or cross-reference a single par- ticipant, 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. iv Resumen Esta disertación es una descripción gramatical de enxet sur, un idioma indígena del Gran Chaco paraguayo, una de las seis lenguas reconocidas de la familia lingüística enlhet- enenlhet (EE o mascoy).