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

濒危语言记录项目旨在发现独特的语言现象，这些语言现象正面临着消失的危险，因为社区不再使用他们的传统语言，而是使用世界各地的语言。在濒危语言中发现的不寻常的类型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是至关重要的。在世界上绝大多数语言中，前缀或后缀是不可能从它们的主词中分离出来形成独立的词的。在德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校的佩西丝·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单词再分析实例。塔尔曼将记录查科博语，这是一种濒临灭绝的帕诺亚语，在玻利维亚北部亚马逊地区有几千人使用。他的发现将成为他博士论文的基础，这是一篇关于查科博语的语法描述，并附有音频和视频记录。Chacobo在语言学理论中特别有趣，因为它的形态-句法过程的不同寻常的行为，如时态和时态语素的“分裂”以及其他功能形态学从其他多合成动词干中分离出来。此外，Chacobo的数据将为亚马逊地区的比较工作提供事实，并为语言变化以及形态学和句法之间的关系的理论提供事实。这是因为查科博语表现出一些语法特征，这些特征被认为出现在帕诺亚语的母语中，而不是在语言相关的变体中。因此，查库波语法将有助于研究早期语言形式的性质及其向现代变体的发展。Adam Tallman还将通过培训社区成员学习语言文档方法来扩大语言实地工作的参与。本论文研究的所有成果将在德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校的拉丁美洲土著语言档案馆存档并可供访问。

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.