Doctoral Dissertation Research (DEL): Documentation of Southeastern Tepehuan: A Corpus of Annotated Texts

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This dissertation project will make an important contribution to ongoing efforts in the field of documenting endangered languages by providing high quality original documentation materials for Southeastern Tepehuan (SET). The project has the dual purpose of providing much needed documentation of naturally-occurring speech in Southeastern Tepehuan or O'odam and of contributing to the linguistic analysis of clause union in this language, one of the least described languages of the Tepiman branch of the Uto-Aztecan family. This research constitutes an important step in data gathering and analysis which will permit comparisons with other Uto-Aztecan and non-Uto-Aztecan languages. The fieldwork period comprises eight months in La Guajolota, Mezquital (Tobaatam) to document different types of communicative events. The project will concentrate on the linguistic annotations and text analysis. Outcomes include 1) a corpus of 15-20 hours of transcribed, annotated, and analyzed SET texts, including audio and video recordings 2) the establishment of an O'odam Documentation Language Committee that will guide, advise and integrate the community in the task of documenting the language, 3) the creation of pedagogical materials for promoting language education and revitalization which will advance the needs of the community by establishing an accessible record of the language and 4) the analysis of clause union in Southeastern Tepehuan in the co-PI's doctoral dissertation.The project outcomes will not only be of interest to the field of linguistics, but also to the fields of anthropology, archaeology, history, sociolinguistics and related fields by providing oral histories and local knowledge of the Tepehuans. The data, in addition to providing a deeper understanding of the language, can potentially be used to evaluate the models of migration and population of northern Mexico that have been proposed to date. The training of native Tepehuan speakers in language description, including methods and tools, will provide the skills necessary for local language documentation which will have an impact on both the acceptance and use of the resulting materials as well as improve the way people reflect on their own language. Additionally, the collected texts, as well the discussions of grammar, will be used to develop pedagogical grammars and materials in the local bilingual education programs.