Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Interaction of Transitivity Alternations and Verbal Affix Stacking in a Morphologically Complex Language

所有的语言都有方法表明谁对谁做了什么，语法上不同的策略提供了对事件的不同视角。例如，如果Pat正在伸手去拿一块饼干，我们可能会期望Pat的妈妈说“Pat打破了罐子”。然而，帕特可能更喜欢说“罐子破了”，甚至是“我妹妹让我打破罐子”。换句话说，Pat可能会出于避免惩罚之类的原因，选择一种语法策略来模糊打破者和被打破对象（事件中的两个参与者）。参与者的这种表达变化被称为价态变化。虽然可能所有的语言都有操纵价的策略，但它们在如何做到这一点上有所不同：可以增加或减少哪些参与者，在什么条件下，以及使用什么语言资源。为了更深入地理解这是如何工作的，语言学家必须研究与英语有很大差异的语言，包括在动词上使用更多后缀和前缀的语言。这个项目将通过探索一种尚未被充分研究的南美土著语言——Mocov&amp；#237；与英语不同，汉语具有高度复杂的词法。更广泛的影响将包括对社区成员和本科生的语言文献和描述的培训，社区教学资源的创建，以及对论文学生的培训。该语料库将通过拉丁美洲土著语言档案馆向学者和公众开放。更广泛地说，这项工作有助于阿根廷土著文化遗产的学术研究。通过为Mocov&amp；#237编写图文小册子等活动支持土著语言的维护；该项目还将继续加强阿根廷和美国在教育和科学合作领域的双边关系。特别是，这项研究将受益于阿根廷国立北方大学和美国德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校的密切合作。该项目对mocov中北部品种的价态变化进行了深入调查&amp；#237；[moc]，一种未被开发的瓜瓜语，在阿根廷东北部使用。关于参与者的操纵如何与语言语法的其他方面相互作用，以及这些资源如何随着时间的推移而发展，语言学家还有很多需要了解的地方。在英语中，说话者倾向于添加像“make”这样的词来增加价，而在具有复杂动词形态的语言中，比如Mocov&amp；#237；，通常会利用不同的资源，比如动词词缀的组合。Mocov& # 237;英语的配价调节机制包括根据策略将词缀堆叠起来，这与经过充分研究的欧洲语言非常不同。现场工作将由两名Mocov&amp；#237；社区成员和共同负责人，德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校的博士生，将创建一个跨话语类型的自然主义语料库，以及关注及物性变化的引出数据。对两种类型数据的综合探索可以评估跨类型、风格等及物性相关现象的可能差异，以及其他问题。语料库还将为mocov的进一步工作提供重要的数据集；，包括在这个语言接触密切的地区探索方言差异及其社会和语言动机。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。

All languages have ways to indicate who did what to whom, and grammatically different strategies offer different perspectives on an event. For example, if Pat is reaching for a cookie, for example, we might expect Pat's mother to say "Pat broke the jar". However, Pat might prefer to say "The jar broke", or even "My sister made me break the jar". In other words, Pat might choose a grammatical strategy that obscures the breaker and the broken object (the two participants in the event) for a reason like avoiding punishment. Such changes in the expression of participants are known as valence alternations. While probably all languages have strategies to manipulate valence, they vary in how they do this: which participants can be added or subtracted, in what conditions, and with what linguistic resources. To achieve the deepest understanding of how this works, linguists must investigate languages which vary significantly from English, including languages which use a greater number of suffixes and prefixes on verbs. This project will contribute to these questions through an exploration of valence alternations in an as yet understudied indigenous South American language, Mocoví, which unlike English displays highly complex verbal morphology. Broader impacts will include the training of community members and undergraduate students in linguistic documentation and description, the creation of community pedagogical resources, and the training of a dissertation student. The corpus will be accessible to scholars and the general public via the Archive of Indigenous Languages of Latin America. More broadly, this work contributes to the scholarship on Argentina's indigenous cultural heritage. By supporting indigenous language maintenance through activities such as the preparation of illustrated booklets for Mocoví primary schools, this project will also continue the strong binational ties between Argentina and the U.S. in the areas of educational and scientific collaboration. In particular, this research will benefit from the close cooperation between the Universidad Nacional del Nordeste (Argentina) and The University of Texas at Austin (U.S.).This project provides an in-depth investigation of valence alternations in the central-northern variety of Mocoví [moc], an underexplored Guaycuruan language spoken in northeastern Argentina. Linguists still have much to understand regarding how the manipulation of participants interacts with other aspects of a language's grammar, and how these resources develop over time. Where in English, speakers tend to add words like "make" to increase valence, languages with complex verbal morphology, like Mocoví, often leverage different resources, such as combinations of verbal affixes. Mocoví's valence-adjusting mechanisms involve the stacking of verbal suffixes according to strategies that are very different from those seen in well-studied European languages. Fieldwork will be carried out by a local team formed by two Mocoví community members and the co-PI, a doctoral student at The University of Texas at Austin, and will create a robust corpus of naturalistic speech across discourse types, together with elicited data focusing on transitivity alternations. The integrated exploration of both types of data allows assessment of possible differences in transitivity-related phenomena across genre, style, etc., among other questions. The corpus will also provide an important data set for further work on Mocoví, including the exploration of dialectal differences and their social and linguistic motivations within this region of intense language contact.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.