Sahaptian and the Evolution of Hierarchical Systems

这项由Spike Gildea指导的研究项目是根据欧洲科学基金会的EUROCORES计划(EuroBABEL)构思的更大国际合作的美国部分。完整的EuroBABEL项目名为《形态语法中的参考层次：描述、类型学、历时》，是来自美国、英国、德国和瑞士等4个国家的研究人员合作完成的。这个特别的项目侧重于萨哈普提语中等级语法系统的演变。在一些语言中，说话者用一种不同的句子来说“I Hit Hit”(正向)，而不是“He Hit Me”(反向)，或者“the man saw a cat”(正向)或“the cat scatch the man”(反向)。在一些语言中，动词与第一人称和第二人称(我/你)一致，但与第三人称(他/她/它)不一致。看看这样的例子，说话者头脑中的等级决定了如何描述事件：我=你，他/她/它人类(人)动物(猫)无生命的东西(岩石)。在其他语言中，排名较低的主语或排名较高的宾语有特殊的语法标记。说这种语言的人交流谁对谁做了什么，但他们不像英语那样使用语法功能，如“主语”和“宾语”，而是使用层次结构中的“较高”和“较低”参与者的语法。这些语言中的许多都严重濒危，只有几个人(通常是老年人)会说。在与欧洲合作伙伴的合作下，研究人员有三个目标：(I)为了验证是否所有语言对相同的等级敏感，他们收集了两个大型数据库，以比较世界各地语言的等级语法。(Ii)为了探索当参与者在层级上平等时，说话者为什么选择一个结构而不是另一个结构(他打了他)，他们用四种语言注释了大量实际言语，编码考虑了活泼、数字和话题性等因素。(Iii)为了帮助理解等级语法是如何开始的，他们正在至少三个语系和一个语言孤立中重建这些语法系统的来源。在这个项目中，研究小组将对Sahaptin数据库进行注释，并将合作进行重建。该合作项目旨在更好地了解说这种语言的民族的思想和文化。

This research project, directed by Spike Gildea, is the US portion of a larger international collaboration that was conceived under the European Science Foundation's EUROCORES Programme, EuroBABEL. The full EuroBABEL project, entitled Referential Hierarchies in Morphosyntax: description, typology, diachrony, is a collaboration of researchers from 4 countries, including the US, the UK, Germany and Switzerland. This particular project focuses on the evolution of hierarchical grammatical systems in Sahaptian. In some languages, speakers use a different kind of sentence to say "I hit him" (Direct) as opposed to "He hit me" (Inverse), or "The man saw a cat" (Direct) versus "The cat scratched the man" (Inverse). In some languages, the verb agrees with first and second persons (me/you), but not with third persons (him/her/it). Looking at examples like these, a hierarchy in the minds of speakers steers choices about how to present descriptions of events: me = you him/her/it humans (a man) animals (a cat) inanimate things (a rock). In other languages, low-ranking subjects or high-ranking objects get special grammatical marking. Speakers of such languages communicate who does what to whom, but instead of using grammatical functions like "subject" and "object" as in English, they use the grammar of "higher" and "lower" participants in the hierarchy. Many of these languages are gravely endangered, with only a few (usually elderly) speakers remaining. In collaboration with their European partners, the researchers have three goals: (i) To verify whether all languages are sensitive to the same hierarchy, they are collecting two large databases to compare hierarchical grammar from languages all over the world. (ii) To explore why speakers choose one construction over another when participants are equal on the hierarchy ("He hit him"), they are annotating large collections of actual speech in four languages, coding for factors like animacy, number, and topicality. (iii) To help understand how hierarchical grammar gets started in the first place, they are reconstructing the sources of these grammatical systems in at least three language families and one linguistic isolate. In this project, the research team will annotate a Sahaptin database and will collaborate on reconstructions. The collaborative project seeks to better understand both the minds and the cultures of peoples who speak such languages.