Doctoral Dissertation Research: Investigating complex word reanalysis through endangered language data

记录濒危语言计划旨在发现独特的语言现象，这些语言现象有可能随着社区停止使用其传统语言而消失。在濒危语言中发现的不寻常的类型学特征有助于准确理解人类语言的局限性和可能性，因此记录这些数据所证明的语言至关重要。 在世界上绝大多数语言中，前缀或后缀不可能从它们的宿主词中分离出来形成独立的词。 在德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校的佩兴斯·埃普斯的指导下，亚当·塔尔曼将对一种濒危语言进行实地考察，以进一步调查这种独特的词汇再分析类型的实例。塔尔曼将记录查科博语，这是一种濒危的帕诺亚语言，在玻利维亚亚马逊河北方有几千人使用。他的研究结果将构成他的博士论文的基础，一个语法描述Chacobo与伴随的音频和视频记录。Chacobo对语言学理论特别有趣，因为它的形态句法过程的不寻常行为，例如时态和体貌词素的“分裂”以及其他功能形态学从其他多合成动词词干中分离出来。此外，Chacobo的数据将为亚马逊地区的比较工作提供事实，并为语言变化和词法与句法之间关系的理论提供事实。这是因为Chacobo表现出一些语法特征，被认为出现在Panoan母语中，而不是语言学上相关的变体中。 因此，Chacobo语法将有助于研究语言早期形式的性质及其发展成为现代变体。Adam Tallman还将通过培训语言文献方法的社区成员来扩大对语言实地工作的参与。从本论文研究的所有产品将在得克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校的拉丁美洲土著语言档案馆存档和访问。

The Documenting Endangered Languages Program seeks to discover unique linguistic phenomena that are in danger of being lost as communities cease to speak their traditional languages in favor of world varieties. Unusual typological features found in endangered languages contribute to an accurate understanding of the limits and possibilities of human language, thus documenting the languages where this data is evidenced is of prime importance. In the large majority of the world's languages it is impossible for prefixes or suffixes to be separated from their host words to form independent words. Working under the direction of Patience Epps at the University of Texas at Austin, Adam Tallman will conduct fieldwork on an endangered language to further investigate instances of this unique type of word reanalysis.Tallman will document Chacobo, an endangered Panoan language spoken by a few thousand people in the northern Bolivian Amazon. His findings will form the basis of his doctoral dissertation, a grammatical description of Chacobo with accompanying audio and video recordings. Chacobo is especially interesting for linguistic theory because of the unusual behavior of its morpho-syntactic processes such as the 'split-off' of tense and aspect morphemes and other functional morphology from an otherwise polysynthetic verb stem. Additionally, the Chacobo data will provide facts for comparative work in Amazonia and for theories about language change and the relationship between morphology and syntax. This is because Chacobo exhibits some grammatical features thought to occur in the Panoan parent language and not in linguistically related varieties. Therefore, Chacobo grammar will contribute to the investigation of the nature of earlier forms of the language and its development into modern varieties. Adam Tallman will also broaden participation in linguistic fieldwork by training community members in language documentation methodology. All products from this dissertation research will be archived and accessible at the Archive of Indigenous Languages of Latin America at the University of Texas at Austin.