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

博士论文研究：形态复杂语言中及物性交替与动词词缀堆叠的相互作用

• 批准号: 1918028
• 负责人: Patience Epps
• 金额: $ 1.89万
• 依托单位: University of Texas at Austin
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2019
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2019-07-01 至 2022-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1918028&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Interaction; Transitivity

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.

所有语言都有指明谁对谁做了什么的方法，语法上不同的策略提供了对事件的不同视角。例如，如果帕特正在伸手去拿饼干，我们可能会认为帕特的母亲会说“帕特打破了罐子”。然而，帕特可能更喜欢说“罐子破了”，甚至“我姐姐让我打破了罐子”。换句话说，帕特可能会出于避免惩罚之类的原因而选择一种语法策略，使打破者和被破坏的物体(事件中的两个参与者)变得模糊。参与者表达的这种变化被称为价交替。虽然可能所有语言都有操纵配价的策略，但它们如何做到这一点是不同的：哪些参与者可以被加减，在什么条件下，用什么语言资源。为了最深入地理解这一原理，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研究的南美土著语言Mocov&amp；的配价变化来解决这些问题，这种语言与英语不同，它表现出高度复杂的动词形态。更广泛的影响将包括对社区成员和本科生进行语言文献和描述方面的培训，创建社区教学资源，以及培训一名论文学生。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。通过为小学编写图文并茂的小册子等活动来支持土著语言的维护，该项目还将继续保持阿根廷和美国在教育和科学合作领域的牢固的两国关系。特别是，这项研究将受益于北德大学(阿根廷)和德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校(美国)之间的密切合作。该项目深入调查了位于阿根廷东北部的一种未被开发的瓜伊库伦语Mocov&amp；[moc]中北部语种的价态变化。关于参与者的操控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，语言学家仍然有很多需要理解的地方。在英语中，说话者倾向于添加像“make”这样的词来增加配价，而具有复杂动词形态的语言，如Mocov；amp；237；，往往会利用不同的资源，比如动词词缀的组合。S的配价调整机制涉及到动词后缀的堆叠策略，这与经过充分研究的欧洲语言中的策略非常不同。田野调查将由两名莫科夫社区成员和德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校的博士生皮耶希组成的一个当地团队进行，并将创建一个强大的语料库，涵盖各种语篇类型的自然主义演讲，以及关注及物性交替的引出数据。这两种类型的数据的综合探索可以评估与及物性相关的现象在体裁、风格等方面的可能差异，以及其他问题。语料库还将为Mocov&amp；的进一步工作提供重要的数据集，包括在这一语言接触频繁的地区探索方言差异及其社会和语言动机。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

项目成果

Relaciones flexibles en mocoví (guaycurú): morfología y léxico

Relaciones flexions en mocovà (guaycurào): morfologà y léxico

• DOI: 10.56683/rs222135
• 发表时间: 2022
• 期刊: RASAL Lingüística
• 作者: Juárez, Cristian