The Verbal Morpho-semantics and Clausal Architecture of Tlingit

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This project will conduct detailed, theoretically-informed fieldwork upon the Tlingit language (Lingít, /lin.kít/), a highly endangered and understudied language indigenous to Alaska, British Columbia, and the Yukon. The project will focus upon aspects of the language related to the expression of time and possibility, as well as the nature of the language's rather flexible word order. This project will yield results of significance to both professional linguists and community members striving to learn Tlingit as a second language. Both groups will directly benefit from the collection of new Tlingit language data, given the language's status as highly endangered. In addition, study of the specific linguistic phenomena identified in this project will make distinct, important contributions to diverse areas of linguistic theory. For example, the investigation of word-order and sentence structure in Tlingit is expected to establish for linguists the existence of 'covert A-scrambling', a grammatical process whose existence is predicted by theory, but which has thus far not been definitively documented. Furthermore, study of the grammatical means by which Tlingit expresses the concepts of time and possibility will inform specific debates surrounding the extent to which languages vary in the expression of these concepts, thus probing deep and long-standing questions relating to human nature and the structure of human cognition.Beyond these technical results, this project will advance ongoing efforts to document, maintain and revitalize the growing number of endangered languages throughout the world, mitigating the inevitable and catastrophic language death that will occur by the end of this century. This project will uncover subtle grammatical generalizations of no small importance to the growing number of persons learning Tlingit as a second language. Moreover, the digital recordings and field reports made during this project will be added to the archives stored at the Sealaska Heritage Institute and the Alaska Native Language Archive, preserving for future Tlingit generations the voices and the words of their forebears.