REG: Morphological Investigations in Formosan Languages

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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.