Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Grammar of Space and Social Distance in Cushillococha Ticuna, an Endangered Language

所有语言都有两类词：一类是没有上下文就能理解的词，比如“青蛙”和“沙子”；另一类是只有在上下文中才能理解的词，比如“这个”、“那个”、“这里”和“你”。这些与语境相关的词在语言学上被称为索引词，与语境无关的词之间有许多不同之处。人们使用不同的认知过程来理解与语境相关的单词。与语境相关的单词在不同语言中的差异更大。手势，如指点，对于理解上下文相关的语言也更重要。此外，由于许多语言学理论关注的是语言中与语境无关的方面，人们对语境相关语言的结构了解甚少。在这种背景下，这项研究考察了一种濒危语言中的语境依赖型语言，这意味着它没有语言亲属。研究人员将从语言学、心理学和人类学的角度研究这个孤立的词的含义和用法，这些词相当于‘这个’、‘那个’、‘这里’、‘那里’、‘他’和‘她’。这项工作将促进对上下文相关语言及其与手势关系的科学理解，手势是一个在自然语言处理、计算机视觉和计算语言学的其他领域中有应用的主题。这些文件将构成COPI撰写的博士论文中分析的核心材料。更广泛的影响包括公开存放录音和文字记录，以及与社区领导人合作，改善当地土著学校使用的扫盲课程，促进该地区的教育公平和经济发展。科比是加州大学伯克利分校的博士生，他将分析Cushillococha Ticuna的文件，这是一种仅在秘鲁使用的濒危土著语言孤立语言。这个项目将特别关注提库纳中两种上下文相关表达的语法：指示词--像这个、那个和那里这样的词--和第三人称代词。提库纳的指示词比其他语言的指示词具有更复杂的含义。英语中的This和That通常被认为是表示物体在空间中的位置，而提库纳语中的等价词既表示物体的位置，又表示整个句子的时态。同样，第三人称代词在提库纳语中的意义比英语和其他知名语言中的更丰富。它们既表示所指对象的性别，如英语中的他和她，也表示说话者对所指对象的尊重程度，如法语代词“tu”(你，非正式)和“vous”(你，正式)。研究者将从逻辑语义学、新格里斯语用学和会话分析三个学科的角度来研究这两个依赖于语境的表达系统。跨学科的研究方法将包括心理语言学实验、对以英语为母语的人的采访以及日常对话的录音。在本项目的指示词部分，研究者将通过(A)将指示词的注意力导向理论应用于具有类型新颖性的数据和(B)探讨他们关于特定词汇启发式在指示词的识解中的作用的主张来检验最近的指示词注意导向理论。在本项目的敬语部分，研究将考察日常会话和访谈数据，以分析(A)敬语的社会意义和(B)其形式语义特征。

All languages have two categories of words: words that can be understood without context, like 'frog' and 'sand,' and words that can only be understood in context, like 'this,' 'that,' 'here,' and 'you.' There are many differences between these context-dependent words, known in linguistics as indexicals, and context-independent words. People use different cognitive processes to understand context-dependent words. Context-dependent words differ more between languages. Gestures, such as pointing, are also more important for understanding context-dependent language. Moreover, because many linguistic theories focus on context-independent aspects of language, the structure of context-dependent language is poorly understood. Against this background, this study examines context-dependent language in an endangered language that is an isolate, meaning it has no linguistic relatives. Using perspectives from linguistics, psychology, and anthropology, the researchers will study the meaning and use of this isolate's words equivalent to 'this,' 'that,' 'here,' 'there,' 'he,' and 'she.' This work will advance scientific understanding of context-dependent language and its relationship to gesture, a topic with applications in natural language processing, computer vision, and other areas of computational linguistics. The documentation will form the core material analyzed in a doctoral dissertation produced by the CoPI. Broader impacts include a publicly available deposit of the recordings and transcriptions, as well as collaborative efforts with community leaders to improve the literacy curriculum used in local indigenous schools, promoting educational equity and economic development in the region.The CoPI, a doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley, will analyze the documentation of Cushillococha Ticuna, an endangered indigenous language isolate spoken only in Peru. This project will specifically focus on the grammar of two types of context-dependent expressions in Ticuna: demonstratives -- words like this, that, and there -- and third-person pronouns. Ticuna's demonstratives have more complex meanings than those of other languages. While English 'this' and 'that' are usually believed to convey an object's location in space, the equivalent words in Ticuna convey both the location of the object and the tense of the entire sentence. Similarly, third person pronouns are richer in meaning in Ticuna than in English and other well-known languages. They encode both the gender of the referent, like English 'he' and 'she,' and the speaker's level of respect for the referent, as in the French pronouns 'tu' (you, informal) and 'vous' (you, formal). The researcher will study these two systems of context-dependent expressions using perspectives from three disciplines: logical semantics, neo-Gricean pragmatics, and Conversation Analysis. The interdisciplinary research methods will incorporate psycholinguistic experiments, interviews with native speakers, and recording of everyday conversations. In the demonstratives component of the project, the researcher will test recent attention-oriented theories of demonstratives by (a) applying them to typologically novel data and (b) probing their claims about the role of lexically specific heuristics in construal of demonstratives. In the honorifics component of the project, the research will examine everyday conversation and interview data to analyze both (a) the social meaning of honorifics and (b) their formal semantic properties.