REG: Morphological Investigations in Formosan Languages

该项目的目的是记录濒临灭绝的南岛语泰雅族在类型学上罕见的形态、句法和语音模式，并将其结构与来自同一家族的另一种濒临灭绝的语言进行比较。主要研究目标是：1)更好地理解信息结构——句子的主题焦点结构——如何与词序和韵律的独立约束相互作用；2)了解这些语言中存在的一些类型学上的特殊构词法过程。对语言的研究将为我们提供关于单词和句子的语言结构的重要信息，这有助于我们对认知过程有更深的了解。因为这些语言很可能在几代人之后就不再被使用了，所以在它们消失之前把它们记录下来是很重要的，尤其是因为这些语言具有类型学上罕见的现象，可能对我们理解语言结构特别有用。本计划将探讨赛思雅语的韵律线索如何标示资讯结构，具体实验将：(1)调查居住在台湾新竹附近的多名母语人士，了解他们对句子的可接受性判断；(2)记录母语人士使用不同词序阅读问答语。赛西雅语是一种主谓宾语言，泰雅语是一种动主宾宾语言，提供了丰富的词序可能性和韵律突出性的比较。该研究项目还将调查罕见的构词过程，其中单个辅音被重复并组合到单词中以表明语法功能。

The goal of this project is to document the typologically rare morphological, syntactic and phonological patterns of the endangered Austronesian Language Atayal, and to compare its structure to that of another endangered language from the same family Saisiyat. The primary research objectives are: 1) to gain a better understanding of how information structure - the topic-focus structuring of the sentence - interacts with independent constraints on word order and with prosody; 2) to understand some typologically exceptional processes of word formation present in these languages. The languages investigated will provide us with important information about the linguistic structure of words and sentences, which helps us gain deeper understanding of cognitive processing. Since these languages are likely to no longer be spoken in a few generations it is important to document them now before they disappear, especially because these languages have typologically rare phenomena that may be especially informative to our understanding of linguistic structure. The project will explore how prosodic cues mark information structure in Saisiyat, in a detailed experimental setting that will 1) survey multiple native speakers, residing near Hsinchu, Taiwan, for acceptability judgments of sentences in their language, and 2) document native speakers reading question-answer discourse using the different word order(s). Saisiyat, an Subject-Verb-Object language, and Atayal, a Verb-Subject-Object language, providing for a rich comparison of word order possibilities and prosodic prominence. The research project will also investigate rare processes of word-formation, where single consonants are duplicated and combined to the word to indicate a grammatical function.