Lexical Acculturation in Native American Languages: Phase 2

美洲原住民语言的词汇适应：第二阶段

• 批准号: 9222311
• 负责人: Cecil Brown
• 金额: $ 3.5万
• 依托单位: Northern Illinois University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 1993
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 1993-03-01 至 1995-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=9222311&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Lexical; Acculturation; Native; American; Languages

The goal of this project is to identify and explain cross-language patterns in ways Native American languages have named new objects or concepts encountered in contact situations with Europeans. This will be achieved by surveying words for 77 items of Occidental culture (e.g., hen, horse, paper, rice, and soap) in vocabularies of 600 to 700 American Indian languages and dialects. Such words are either loanwords (e.g., from Portuguese into Brazilian Indian languages) or terms manufactured from native vocabulary (e.g., "little maggots" for rice in many North American Indian languages). Preliminary research suggests, for example, that languages that are heavy adopters of European loans for these items have histories involving significant bilingualism of speakers, while languages that show considerable use of native terms for such items do not have such histories. Another preliminary finding is that some items of acculturation, such as the hen, tend strongly to be labeled by native terms across languages, while other items, such as the horse, tend to be labeled by loanwords. This finding indicates that words for items such as horse may have been used in interactions with donors in the past to a greater extent than have words for items such as hen. Eludications and explanation of these and other findings will contribute to several areas of anthropological interest including sociolinguistics, ethnobiology, language universals, language and culture change, areal phenomena, and social histories of individual Native American groups.

这个项目的目标是通过美洲土著语言命名与欧洲人接触时遇到的新物体或概念的方式来识别和解释跨语言模式。这将通过在600到700种美洲印第安语言和方言的词汇中调查西方文化中的77个项目（例如，母鸡、马、纸、大米和肥皂）来实现。这些词要么是外来词（例如，从葡萄牙语到巴西印第安语），要么是从本土词汇中制造出来的术语（例如，在许多北美印第安语中，“小蛆虫”表示大米）。例如，初步研究表明，大量采用欧洲借词的语言在历史上涉及到大量的双语使用者，而大量使用本土术语的语言则没有这样的历史。另一个初步发现是，一些文化适应的项目，比如母鸡，在不同的语言中都倾向于用本土术语来标记，而其他项目，比如马，则倾向于用外来词来标记。这一发现表明，在过去与捐赠者的互动中，与“母鸡”等词语相比，“马”等词语的使用频率可能更高。对这些和其他发现的总结和解释将有助于人类学兴趣的几个领域，包括社会语言学、民族生物学、语言普遍性、语言和文化变化、地区现象和个别美洲土著群体的社会历史。