Sahaptian and the Evolution of Hierarchical Systems

该研究项目由Spike Gildea指导，是欧洲科学基金会EUROCORES计划EuroBABEL下构想的更大国际合作的美国部分。完整的EuroBABEL项目名为"形态句法中的指称层次：描述、类型学、历时性"，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。这个特别的项目集中在萨哈普特语的等级语法系统的演变。在某些语言中，说话者使用不同类型的句子来表达“我打了他”（直接）而不是“他打了我”（反向），或者“那个人看到了一只猫”（直接）而不是“猫抓伤了那个人”（反向）。在某些语言中，动词与第一和第二人称（我/你）一致，但与第三人称（他/她/它）不一致。看看这些例子，说话者头脑中的等级制度决定了如何描述事件：我=你他/她/它人类（一个男人）动物（一只猫）无生命的东西（一块石头）。在其他语言中，低级别的主语或高级别的宾语会得到特殊的语法标记。这些语言的使用者交流谁对谁做了什么，但不是像英语那样使用"主语"和"宾语"这样的语法功能，而是使用层次结构中"较高"和"较低"参与者的语法。这些语言中的许多都严重濒危，只有少数人（通常是老年人）仍在使用。研究人员与他们的欧洲合作伙伴合作，有三个目标：（i）为了验证所有语言是否对同一层次结构敏感，他们正在收集两个大型数据库，以比较世界各地语言的层次语法。(ii)为了探究当参与者在层级上平等时（"He hit him"），说话者为什么会选择一种结构而不是另一种结构，他们用四种语言注释了大量的实际语音，对诸如生命性、数量和时事性等因素进行了编码。(iii)为了帮助理解层次语法最初是如何开始的，他们正在重建这些语法系统在至少三个语系和一个孤立语言中的来源。在这个项目中，研究小组将注释Sahaptin数据库，并将合作重建。该合作项目旨在更好地了解讲这些语言的人民的思想和文化。

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.