Doctoral Dissertation Research: Focus and focus-sensitivity in Kichee

博士论文研究：基奇语中的焦点和焦点敏感性

• 批准号: 1226648
• 负责人: David Beaver
• 金额: $ 0.91万
• 依托单位: University of Texas at Austin
• 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: 2012-08-01 至 2014-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1226648&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Focus; focus

This study will investigate focus and focus-senstivity in K'ichee', a Mayan language of Guatemala. Focus -- the special prominence given to contrastive or question-answering constituents -- may be realized in different ways in different languages: for instance, using prosodic emphasis, or changes in word order. This has made it a phenomenon of particular interest for researchers curious about the interfaces between phonology, syntax and/or pragmatics. Focus also has relevance to the semantics/pragmatics interface, via the phenomenon of focus sensitivity: changes in focus placement can affect the entailments or presuppositions of a sentence which contains certain expressions focus-sensitive expressions, including exclusive (e.g. 'only,' 'mere(ly)') and additive or scalar- additive particles (e.g 'also' and 'even').Working under the direction of Dr. Beaver, Mr. Velleman will conduct fieldwork in the town of Nahualá, in the K'ichee'-speaking region of the Guatemalan highlands, in order to arrive at a more complete picture of focus marking and focus-sensitivity in K'ichee'. Past work on focus in Mayan langauges has described focus movement as the sole focus-marking strategy. Mr. Velleman's own preliminary field data shows that this is incorrect: K'ichee' also has a focus-in-situ strategy which has so far gone undescribed. As for focus-sensitivity, it has not been discussed in detail in K'ichee', or indeed in any Mesoamerican language. Over the course of two field trips, he will elicit semantic judgments from native speakers; and will collect, transcribe and analyze recordings of spontaneous conversation, task-related dialogue, and semi-spontaneous question/answer pairs. The analysis of these data will contribute to our understanding of crosslinguistic semantic and pragmatic variation. The recordings and transcriptions will also add to our documentary record of the K'ichee' language, and will be publically archived so that future researchers and interested K'ichee' speakers may access them.

这项研究将调查危地马拉玛雅语言K‘ichee中的焦点和焦点敏感。焦点--给予对比成分或问答成分的特殊突出--在不同的语言中可能以不同的方式实现：例如，使用韵律强调，或改变词序。这使得它成为研究人员对音系学、句法和/或语用学之间的接口特别感兴趣的现象。焦点还通过焦点敏感现象与语义/语用界面相关：焦点位置的变化会影响一个句子的蕴含或预设，该句子包含对焦点敏感的某些短语，包括排他性的(如‘only’、‘(Ly)’)和加性或标量加性助词(如‘Also’和‘Even’)。在比弗博士的指导下，韦尔曼将在危地马拉高地K‘ichee语言地区的Nahualá镇进行田野调查。为了更全面地了解《K‘ichee》中的焦点标记和焦点敏感度。过去在玛雅语言中对焦点的研究将焦点运动描述为唯一的焦点标记策略。维尔曼自己的初步现场数据表明，这是不正确的：Kichee也有一种现场聚焦战略，但到目前为止还没有描述。至于焦点敏感度，在K‘ichee’中没有详细讨论过，甚至在任何中美洲语言中都没有。在两次实地考察的过程中，他将从母语人士那里获得语义判断；并将收集、转录和分析自发对话、任务相关对话和半自发问题/答案对的录音。对这些数据的分析将有助于我们理解跨语言的语义和语用变异。录音和转录还将添加到我们的纪录片记录的基奇语言，并将被公开存档，以便未来的研究人员和感兴趣的基奇语言使用者可以访问它们。