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

博士论文研究：濒危语言 Cushillococha Ticuna 中的空间和社交距离语法

• 批准号: 1741571
• 负责人: Lev Michael
• 金额: $ 1.7万
• 依托单位: University of California-Berkeley
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2017
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2017-08-01 至 2020-03-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1741571&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Grammar; Space

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.

所有的语言都有两类词：一类是可以在没有上下文的情况下理解的词，比如“青蛙”和“沙子”，另一类是只能在上下文中理解的词，比如“这个”、“那个”、“这里”和“你”。“这些依赖于上下文的词，在语言学中被称为索引词，与上下文无关的词之间有很多区别。人们使用不同的认知过程来理解上下文相关的单词。 不同语言之间的上下文相关词汇差异更大。手势，如指向，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语言的上下文无关方面，因此对上下文相关语言的结构知之甚少。在此背景下，本研究探讨了一种濒危语言的语境依赖语言，这是一个孤立的，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使用，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，这是一个在自然语言处理，计算机视觉和计算语言学其他领域应用的主题。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提供录音和录音的存款，以及与社区领导人合作改善当地土著学校使用的识字课程，促进该地区的教育公平和经济发展。CoPI是加州大学伯克利分校的博士生，将分析Cushillococha Ticuna的文献，只在秘鲁说的一种濒临灭绝的土著语言。这个项目将特别关注Ticuna中两种类型的上下文相关表达的语法：指示词-像这样的词，那个，还有-和第三人称代词。提库纳语的指示词比其他语言的指示词有更复杂的含义。虽然英语中的“this”和“that”通常被认为是表达物体在空间中的位置，但Ticuna中的对应词既表达了物体的位置，也表达了整个句子的时态。同样，第三人称代词在提库纳语中的含义比英语和其他知名语言更丰富。它们既编码了所指对象的性别，如英语中的“他”和“她”，也编码了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、新格赖斯语用学和会话分析三个学科的角度来研究这两个语境相关表达系统。跨学科的研究方法将包括心理语言学实验，与母语人士的访谈，以及日常对话的记录。在该项目的指示词部分，研究者将测试最近的注意力为导向的指示词理论（a）将其应用到类型学上的新数据和（B）探索他们的要求的作用，词汇特定的指示词的联想。在这个项目的honorics部分，研究将检查日常会话和采访数据，分析（a）honorics的社会意义和（B）他们的正式语义属性。