Doctoral Dissertation Research: Blafe Documentation and Description

博士论文研究：Blaf 文档和描述

• 批准号: 1263754
• 负责人: Maria Polinsky
• 金额: $ 1.18万
• 依托单位: Harvard University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2013
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2013-07-01 至 2015-02-28
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1263754&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Blafe; Documentation

This grant supports the fieldwork and research for a project to document Nama, an endangered language spoken in Western Province, Papua New Guinea, one of the most linguistically diverse countries in the world where language documentation is critically needed. Spoken by around 1,200 people, Nama belongs to the Morehead-Upper Maro family, which is a poorly understood and undocumented minority Papuan language group. Nama is interesting because it exhibits a set of morphosyntactic properties which are unattested in the Trans-New Guinea (TNG) family, the largest and heretofore most extensively documented Papuan family. Furthermore, Nama uses an extremely rare senary numeral system with the base 6, which is assumed to have cultural underpinnings. The documentation of Nama will be an important step toward providing a more fine-grained characterization of Papuan languages and developing a more comprehensive account of linguistic variation in the New Guinea region. It will also establish significant ties between outside researchers and the Nama community and will validate the importance of Nama among the local population.This project will produce an extensive and multifaceted description of Nama: a comprehensive reference grammar detailing syntactic, morphological, and phonological properties of Nama; a Nama-English lexical database which will lay the foundation for the future compilation of a bilingual dictionary; a publicly accessible online corpus of annotated audio recordings of native speakers (containing, for example, short stories, conversations, narratives, elicited utterances); an archive of textual and paradigmatic materials; and, research papers analyzing morphosyntactic properties of theoretical significance. This project will also contribute to the scientific training of a promising scholar.

这笔赠款支持一个项目的实地工作和研究，以记录纳马语，这是巴布亚新几内亚西部省使用的一种濒危语言，是世界上语言最多样化的国家之一，急需语言文献。大约有1，200人说Nama，Nama属于Morehead-Upper Maro家族，这是一个鲜为人知且无证的少数民族巴布亚语群体。 Nama是有趣的，因为它表现出一套形态句法的属性，这是未经证实的跨新几内亚（TNG）的家庭，最大的和迄今为止最广泛的记录巴布亚家庭。此外，纳摩使用了一种极其罕见的以6为基数的六进制数字系统，这被认为是有文化基础的。Nama的记录将是对巴布亚语言进行更精细描述和对新几内亚地区语言变异进行更全面描述的重要一步。该项目还将在外部研究人员和纳马社区之间建立重要联系，并将证实纳马在当地居民中的重要性，该项目将对纳马进行广泛和多方面的描述：详细说明纳马的句法、形态和语音特征的综合参考语法;纳马-英语词汇数据库，为今后编纂双语词典奠定基础;一个可公开访问的在线语料库的注释录音的母语者（包含，例如，短篇小说，对话，叙述，引发的话语）;一个档案的文本和聚合材料;和，研究论文分析morphosyntax属性的理论意义。 该项目还将有助于培养一名有前途的学者。