Doctoral Dissertation Research: Documenting information structure in Isthmus Zapotec

博士论文研究：记录萨波特克地峡的信息结构

• 批准号: 1064624
• 负责人: Lenore Grenoble
• 金额: $ 1.2万
• 依托单位: University of Chicago
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2011
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2011-09-15 至 2013-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1064624&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Documenting; information

Isthmus Zapotec (ZAI) is a Zapotecan language of the Otomanguean stock spoken by approximately 80,000 people in and around Juchitán de Zaragoza, in southern Oaxaca, Mexico. Although the percentage of residents of Juchitán older than 50 who speak ZAI is quite high (more than 80%), the percentage of children who are growing up speaking the language is much lower, hovering around 50%. Thus, while stable Spanish-ZAI bilingualism has been the norm for several centuries, the language shift from ZAI to Spanish is now occurring very quickly (as is common in the majority of indigenous communities throughout Mexico). Given that the long-term viability of the language is uncertain, it is important to document spontaneous language use in a variety of natural contexts.The main objective of this project is to document information structure in the language by recording, transcribing, annotating, and analyzing spoken texts from spontaneous life narratives. In addition, native speaker judgments of constructed examples will be elicited. Information structure is understood as the study of the ways that the different components of sentences -- intonation, morphology, and syntax -- are organized by speakers in order to communicate certain kinds of information. Although the available linguistic documentation on ZAI is greater than that of most other Mexican indigenous languages, particularly those outside of the Mayan language family, no documentation of information structure or discourse phenomena exists for this language. The documentary corpus to be obtained will thus allow for a more complete understanding of the range of constructions that are available to IZ speakers and how they are employed to respond to specific discourse motivations. These materials promise to bring novel data to Mesoamerican linguistics and will provide new grounds from which to evaluate and inform theoretical work on information structure and narrative.Proper linguistic documentation and, in particular, the documentation of discourse can be an important tool in forging effective language maintenance efforts in the ZAI community. The recordings and transcriptions will be made available to the community, thereby contributing to ZAI language teaching and learning. The documentation of ZAI oral genres could have an especially positive effect, since local schools lack materials derived from their own oral traditions and/or from naturally-occurring speech.

地峡Zapotec（Zai）是墨西哥南部瓦哈卡州南部的JuchitánDeZaragoza及其周围大约80,000人说的Otomanguean股票的Zapotecan语言。尽管说Zai的50岁以上的Juchitán居民的百分比很高（超过80％），但长大的讲话的儿童百分比要低得多，徘徊在50％左右。这是，虽然稳定的西班牙语双语主义一直是几个世纪以来的常态，但语言从Zai转向西班牙语的转变现在很快发生（在整个墨西哥的大多数个别社区中很常见）。鉴于语言的长期生存能力是不确定的，因此在各种自然环境中记录赞助语言的使用非常重要。该项目的主要目的是通过记录，转录，注释和分析赞助生活叙事中的口头文本来记录语言中的信息结构。此外，将引起母语人士的构造例子法官。信息结构被理解为对句子的不同组成部分（语调，形态和语法）的研究，以便传达某些信息。尽管有关Zai上的可用语言文档大于大多数其他墨西哥本地语言，尤其是玛雅语家族以外的语言，但没有信息结构或话语现象的文献。因此，要获得的纪录片语料库将使对IZ演讲者可用的构造范围以及如何使用它们来响应特定的话语动机。这些材料承诺将新颖的数据带入中美洲语言学，并将提供新的基础，以评估和为信息结构和叙述性提供理论工作。Proper语言文献，尤其是话语文档可能是在Zai社区中为有效的语言维持工作的重要工具。录音和抄录将提供给社区，从而为Zai语言教学做出贡献。 Zai口头流派的文献可能会产生特别积极的效果，因为当地学校缺乏源自其口头传统和/或自然言语的材料。