REG: Morphological Investigations in Formosan Languages

REG：台湾语言形态学研究

• 批准号: 1219533
• 负责人: Khalil Iskarous
• 金额: $ 1.26万
• 依托单位: University of Southern California
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2012
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2012-06-01 至 2013-11-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1219533&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: REG; Morphological; Investigations; Formosan; Languages

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.

这个项目的目标是记录濒危的南岛语泰雅族在形态学、句法学和语音学上的罕见模式，并将其结构与来自同一家族的另一种濒危语言赛夏语进行比较。研究的主要目的是：1）更好地理解信息结构-句子的主题-焦点结构-如何与独立的词序和韵律约束相互作用; 2）理解这些语言中存在的一些类型学上的特殊构词过程。研究的语言将为我们提供有关单词和句子的语言结构的重要信息，这有助于我们更深入地了解认知过程。由于这些语言很可能在几代人之后就不再使用了，因此在它们消失之前记录它们是很重要的，特别是因为这些语言具有类型学上罕见的现象，这些现象可能对我们理解语言结构特别有用。该项目将探讨韵律线索如何标记赛夏语的信息结构，在一个详细的实验环境中，将1）调查多个母语者，居住在台湾新竹附近，在他们的语言中的句子的可接受性判断，和2）记录母语者使用不同的词序阅读问答话语。赛夏语是一种主谓宾语言，泰雅语是一种动主宾语言，这两种语言提供了丰富的语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，其中单个辅音被复制并结合到单词中以指示语法功能。