Van Gysel Jens E.L. A Usage-based Account of Ongoing Structural Changes in Sanapaná: Grammar Sketch and Case Studies

University of New Mexico, 2024. — 735 p.This dissertation presents three case studies on sociolinguistic variation in Sanapaná, an Enlhet-Enenlhet language spoken by around 1000 people in Paraguay. It investigates the impact of the process of language shift towards Paraguayan Guarani and Spanish that Sanapaná is undergoing. Specifically, it attempts to disentangle the effects of speakers’ multilingualism in Spanish and/or Guarani, their frequency of use of Sanapaná, and structural factors internal to Sanapaná on phonetic, morphological, and syntactic variation. It finds that Spanish/Guarani proficiency is correlated with L1-to-L2 convergence in Sanapaná vowel productions and use of different motion framing strategies, while frequency of Sanapaná usage is a better predictor of morphological behavior in possessive constructions. I provide a unified account of these findings in an exemplar-theoretic framework. These case studies are accompanied by a grammar sketch based on a corpus of six hours of fully analyzed naturalistic speech supplemented with translation-based, stimulus-based, and text-based elicitation.