Doctoral Dissertation Grant: Documentation and Analysis of a Typologically Uncommon Maimai Language

新几内亚是澳大利亚北部的一个大岛，约占世界陆地总面积的2%。尽管它的面积很大，但它也包含了世界上大约20%（超过1000种）的语言。对于这些语言中的绝大多数，没有文档。此外，新几内亚的许多语言都濒临灭绝，这在很大程度上是由于托克比索语的入侵，托克比索语是一种以英语为基础的克里奥尔语，是一种通用语。鉴于幼儿不再学习传统语言而不是托克比索语，新几内亚的许多语言很可能在本世纪末灭绝。这些语言的文档和描述对语言的科学研究都有很大的影响。从科学的角度来看，新几内亚的语言在世界语言中表现出罕见的特征，比如在功能中使用动词，这在类型学上是不寻常的；以前未经证实的构词形式；和复杂的辅音串。了解这些语言系统是如何工作的，可以告诉我们语言是如何随着时间的推移而变化的，以及人口是如何在世界各地流动的。对于使用这些语言的社区来说，这些文档可能代表了他们的语言和他们所包含的知识的唯一记录。由于这些语言中的许多都处于濒危状态，现在必须进行记录和描述，否则它们将永远消失。将完成的工作的更广泛的影响是论文和伴随的博士学位，研究人员将获得。所有收集到的数据都将在PARADISEC存档，这是一个专门研究太平洋语言的档案。提供给这个档案的数据，以及该语言的字典，将对研究人员、说豫语的社区和感兴趣的公众开放。纽约州立大学布法罗分校的博士生托马斯·迪亚兹（Thomas Diaz）将在马修·德莱尔（Matthew Dryer）博士的指导下，记录并描述一种名为Heyo的语言。Heyo是Torricelli语系的一员，属于Maimai分支，在巴布亚新几内亚西北部使用。虽然托里切利语系的其他七个分支都得到了一定程度的描述和文件，但麦麦分支没有得到这样的待遇，仍然完全没有记录。该项目将包括三个主要步骤。首先，研究人员将收集并记录巴布亚新几内亚说话人的原始数据。这些数据包括传统叙事、自然对话和文化表演。在收集到原始数据后，研究者将对这些数据进行分析和注释，以发现语言的语言结构。在项目的最后阶段，研究人员将，作为他的博士论文的要求，产生Heyo的语法描述。文档将包括类型学上罕见的争论和性别标记的描述；话语政治学的复杂系统；词类之间的形态句法区分也变得模糊，主要是名词和动词。此外，该项目还将使人们了解在谱系上不同但在地理上相近的语言之间的联系和借用模式。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

New Guinea, a large island north of Australia, makes up approximately 2% of the total land area of the world. Despite its size, it also contains roughly 20% (over 1,000) of the world's languages. For a vast majority of these languages, there exists no documentation. In addition, many of the languages of New Guinea are critically endangered, due in large part to the incursion of Tok Pisin, which is an English-based creole that serves as a lingua franca. Given the fact that young children are ceasing to learn heritage languages in lieu of Tok Pisin, many of the languages of New Guinea are likely to be extinct by the end of the century. The documentation and description of these languages can have a large impact for both the scientific study of language. From a scientific standpoint, the languages of New Guinea exhibit features that are rare among the languages of the world, such as the use of verbs in functions which are typologically unusual; forms of word-formation that were previously unattested; and complex strings of consonants. Understanding how these linguistic systems work can inform how languages change over time, and how populations have moved around the world. For the communities which speak these languages, the documentation can potentially represent the only record of their language and the knowledge that they contain. Due to many of these languages' endangered status, documentation and description must be undertaken now, or they will be lost forever. A broader impact of the work that will be completed is the dissertation and concomitant PhD that the researcher will obtain. All data collected will be archived in PARADISEC, an archive that specializes in languages of the Pacific. The data provided to this archive, as well as a dictionary of the language, will be openly accessible to researchers, the Heyo-speaking community, and interested members of the public.Doctoral student Thomas Diaz of SUNY at Buffalo, under the advisement of Dr. Matthew Dryer, will document and describe one such language, named Heyo. Heyo is a member of the Torricelli family of languages, belonging to the Maimai branch and spoken in the northwest of Papua New Guinea. While every other of the Torricelli language family's seven branches have received some level of description and documentation, the Maimai branch has received no such treatment and remains completely undocumented. The project will consist of three major steps. First, the researcher will collect and record raw data from speakers in Papua New Guinea. This data consists of traditional narratives, naturalistic conversation, and cultural performances. After the collection of raw data, the researcher will analyze and annotate this data for linguistic phenomena, and uncover the linguistic structure of the language. In the final stages of the project, the researcher will, as a requirement for his doctoral dissertation, produce a grammatical description of Heyo. The documentation will include descriptions of typologically rare argument and gender marking; the complex system of discourse clitics; and the blurring of morphosyntactic distinctions between word classes, primarily in regards to nouns and verb. Furthermore, this project will inform knowledge of contact and borrowing patterns across genealogically disparate, but geographically close languages.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.