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

所有的语言都有办法表明谁对谁做了什么，语法上不同的策略提供了对一个事件的不同观点。例如，如果帕特伸手去拿饼干，我们可能会期望帕特的妈妈说“帕特打破了罐子”。然而，帕特可能更喜欢说“罐子破了”，甚至是“我姐姐让我打破罐子”。换句话说，帕特可能会选择一种语法策略，模糊破坏者和被破坏的对象（事件中的两个参与者），以避免惩罚。 参与者表达的这种变化被称为配价交替。虽然可能所有的语言都有策略来操纵配价，但它们在如何做到这一点上各不相同：哪些参与者可以增加或减少，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一机制，语言学家必须研究与英语有显著差异的语言，包括在动词上使用更多后缀和前缀的语言。这个项目将有助于这些问题，通过探索尚未充分研究的南美土著语言，莫科夫#237;，这与英语显示高度复杂的动词形态。更广泛的影响将包括培训社区成员和本科生的语言文献和描述，社区教学资源的创建，以及论文学生的培训。学者和公众可通过拉丁美洲土著语言档案查阅该语料库。更广泛地说，这项工作有助于阿根廷土著文化遗产的研究。通过诸如为第237期莫科夫会议编写插图小册子等活动，支持土著语言的维护&;该项目还将继续阿根廷和美国在教育和科学合作领域的强大两国关系。特别是，这项研究将受益于Universidad Nacional del Nordeste（阿根廷）和德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校（美国）之间的密切合作。该项目提供了一个深入的调查中北部品种的Mocov #237; [moc]，在阿根廷东北部讲的一种未充分开发的Guaycuruan语言的价态变化。语言学家仍然有很多东西要了解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。在英语中，说话者倾向于添加像“make”这样的词来增加效价，而具有复杂动词形态的语言，如Mocov，通常利用不同的资源，例如动词词缀的组合。莫科夫í的配价调整机制涉及动词后缀的堆叠，根据策略，这是非常不同的，从那些被充分研究的欧洲语言。实地工作将由当地的一个小组进行，该小组由两名莫科夫í社区成员和co-PI，德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校的博士生，将创建一个强大的跨话语类型的自然主义语音语料库，以及关注及物性交替的引出数据。对这两种类型的数据的综合探索允许评估跨体裁，风格等与及物性相关的现象中可能存在的差异，以及其他问题。该语料库还将为进一步研究Mocov #237提供重要的数据集&;该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力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.