Understanding spatial determiners, complex predicates, and case marking through traditional narratives in endangered languages

通过濒危语言的传统叙述理解空间限定词、复杂谓词和格标记

• 批准号: 1360800
• 负责人: Lenore Grenoble
• 金额: $ 24万
• 依托单位: University of Chicago
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2014
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2014-08-15 至 2018-01-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1360800&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Understanding; spatial; determiners; complex; predicates

The primary goal of the Documenting Endangered Languages program is to create thorough accessible audio-visual documentation and description of languages dangerously close to extinction. It aims to capture, before the information is permanently lost, the linguistic features of each language, opening a window into the capabilities of the human mind, as well as the language's unique cultural, geographic, and social setting. The current project contributes to this goal by thoroughly documenting two neighboring related languages, Matngele and MalakMalak, spoken in remote northern Australia.Lenore Grenoble and Dorothea Hoffman, experienced language documenters from the University of Chicago, will create an annotated database which will include indigenous historical and personal narratives, natural conversation, and data from targeted elicitation. They will create a rich corpus useful in investigating a range of grammatical features, especially spatial determiners, complex predicate ordering, and morphological marking of grammatical agents and patients. Historical narratives from the indigenous languages of Australia are deeply rooted in landscape and environmental features. In these narratives, landscape features are inherent elements of the grammar and are expressed in substantial uses of deictic and spatial determiners, coverbs, and suffixes. The very structure of the narratives is determined by spatial ordering and the use of motion descriptions at episode boundaries. MalakMalak and Matngele narratives and other spontaneous speech samples are also excellent sources of data for optional ergative/absolutive case-marking syntactic structure that is governed by prosody, information structure, and discourse environment. Similarly, one finds information on complex predicates whose ordering is not fixed but also potentially determined by information structure. There are also a small number of optional noun classifiers whose usage is subject to discourse constraints. Finally, the two tribes of MalakMalak and Matngele have been in close cultural and linguistic contact for a long time. Unique storytelling techniques and bilingualism in this setting offer exceptional insight into language and literary contact in a highly diverse multilingual and multicultural setting.By involving, speakers, local schools, and adults no longer actively speaking the languages, the proposed project may be able to encourage revitalization processes of both languages. Documentary materials from this project will be accessible from the Endangered Languages Archive at the University of London and at the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures.

记录濒危语言项目的主要目标是为濒临灭绝的语言创建全面的视听文件和描述。它的目的是在信息永久丢失之前，捕捉每种语言的语言特征，打开一扇窗户，了解人类的思维能力，以及语言独特的文化、地理和社会环境。目前的项目通过彻底记录两种邻近的相关语言，即澳大利亚北部偏远地区的Matngele和MalakMalak，为实现这一目标做出了贡献。Lenore Grenoble和Dorothea Hoffman是芝加哥大学经验丰富的语言记录学家，他们将创建一个带注释的数据库，其中将包括土著历史和个人叙述、自然对话以及有针对性的启发数据。他们将创建一个丰富的语料库，用于研究一系列语法特征，特别是空间限定词，复杂谓词排序，以及语法代理和患者的形态标记。澳大利亚土著语言的历史叙事深深植根于景观和环境特征。在这些叙事中，景观特征是语法的固有元素，并通过大量使用指示语和空间限定词、封面和后缀来表达。叙事的结构是由空间顺序和情节边界的动作描述决定的。MalakMalak和Matngele叙事和其他自发语音样本也是韵律、信息结构和话语环境所支配的可选否定/绝对格标记句法结构的极好数据来源。类似地，可以找到复杂谓词上的信息，这些谓词的顺序不是固定的，但也可能由信息结构决定。还有少数可选名词分类词，其用法受语篇限制。最后，MalakMalak和Matngele这两个部落长期以来一直保持着密切的文化和语言联系。在这个环境中，独特的讲故事技巧和双语能力提供了在高度多样化的多语言和多元文化环境中对语言和文学接触的独特见解。通过让讲者、当地学校和不再积极使用这两种语言的成年人参与进来，提议的计划可能能够鼓励两种语言的振兴进程。该项目的文献资料将从伦敦大学濒危语言档案馆和太平洋及地区濒危文化数字资源档案馆获取。