Doctoral Dissertation Research: The role of animacy and obviation in the processing of Ojibwe relative clauses

博士论文研究：生命性和回避性在奥及布威语关系从句处理中的作用

• 批准号: 1918244
• 负责人: Brian Dillon
• 金额: $ 1.51万
• 依托单位: University of Massachusetts Amherst
• 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: 2019-08-15 至 2021-01-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1918244&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; role; animacy

This project investigates how speakers of Southwestern Ojibwe use the language's unique grammatical features to understand complex sentences. Southwestern Ojibwe is a revitalizing indigenous language spoken by approximately 5,000 first and second language speakers in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Southern Ontario. Its grammar has been researched for decades, but little is known about how speakers produce and understand Ojibwe sentences during normal language comprehension and production. This is the focus of current project. Specifically, this research addresses the question of whether listeners use Ojibwe-specific grammatical cues to make predictions about how the meaning of the sentence will resolve, focusing on what types of information Ojibwe speakers use to identify the grammatical subject of a sentence. This project joins a small but growing body of research that looks at endangered and understudied languages using experimental fieldwork, and expands our understanding of how the cognitive capabilities common to all humans are used to produce and comprehend languages that differ in how their grammar expresses meaning. Furthermore, the results of this research will be shared with the Southwestern Ojibwe-speaking community to bolster language revitalization efforts.All languages can refer to both living (animate) and non-living (inanimate) entities, and have different ways of conveying the importance of different characters in a story. However, Ojibwe is unique in that these functions play a central role in the grammar of the language. In Ojibwe, nouns get different grammatical markers according to whether they refer to animate or inanimate entities. Furthermore, animate nouns participate in a unique "spotlighting" system. When there are multiple animate nouns in a story, conversation, or discourse, one of them is designated proximate (the character in the spotlight), while all others are marked obviative (the characters outside of the spotlight). Ojibwe further differs from languages like English in that word order does not serve as the primary cue for understanding the meaning of a sentence. Instead, Ojibwe has a complex system where the form of agreement on the verb and the animacy/obviation information on nouns are used together to understand the meaning of a sentence. The proposed study will look at how Ojibwe speakers use these sources of information to understand who is doing a particular action, and who is undergoing an action. Two methods will be employed. First, a language production task, where speakers are given an incomplete sentence preamble and are asked to use it to form a complete sentence, will be used to determine what assumptions speakers make about the grammatical role of ambiguous nouns. Second, a language comprehension task where participants will listen to sentences in Ojibwe while looking at an array of pictures corresponding to different interpretations of the sentence. Participants' eye movements will be recorded to understand how the interpretation of the sentence unfolds and changes over time in response to the input. The proposed study is the first of its kind on Ojibwe, and will be of interest to linguists interested in the cognitive representation of language, and to community members interested in revitalization.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.

本项目研究西南Ojibwe的发言者如何使用语言的独特语法特征来理解复杂的句子。西南奥吉布韦是一种振兴土著语言，在明尼苏达州，威斯康星州和安大略南部约有5,000名第一和第二语言使用者。它的语法已经研究了几十年，但很少有人知道说话者如何在正常的语言理解和生产过程中产生和理解Ojibwe句子。这是当前项目的重点。具体而言，本研究解决的问题，听众是否使用Ojibwe特定的语法线索，使预测的意义，句子将如何解决，重点是什么类型的信息Ojibwe扬声器使用，以确定一个句子的语法主题。该项目加入了一个小但不断增长的研究机构，该机构使用实验性实地考察来研究濒危和未充分研究的语言，并扩大了我们对所有人类共同的认知能力如何用于产生和理解语法表达意义不同的语言的理解。此外，这项研究的结果将与西南部的Ojibwe社区分享，以支持语言振兴工作。所有的语言都可以指生物（有生命的）和非生物（无生命的）实体，并有不同的方式来传达故事中不同人物的重要性。然而，Ojibwe的独特之处在于这些功能在语言的语法中发挥着核心作用。 在Ojibwe中，名词根据它们是否指有生命或无生命的实体而获得不同的语法标记。此外，有生命的名词参与了一个独特的“聚光灯”系统。当一个故事、对话或话语中有多个有生命的名词时，其中一个被标记为接近的（聚光灯下的人物），而所有其他的被标记为排除的（聚光灯外的人物）。Ojibwe与英语等语言的进一步区别在于，词序并不作为理解句子含义的主要线索。相反，Ojibwe有一个复杂的系统，在这个系统中，动词上的一致形式和名词上的生命性/排除信息被一起用来理解句子的含义。拟议的研究将着眼于Ojibwe发言人如何使用这些信息来源，以了解谁正在做一个特定的行动，谁正在经历一个行动。将采用两种方法。首先，一个语言生产的任务，其中扬声器给出了一个不完整的句子序言，并要求使用它来形成一个完整的句子，将被用来确定什么样的假设扬声器的语法作用的歧义名词。第二，语言理解任务，参与者将在Ojibwe中听句子，同时观看与句子的不同解释相对应的一系列图片。参与者的眼球运动将被记录下来，以了解句子的解释如何随着时间的推移而展开和变化。这项研究是Ojibwe的第一项此类研究，对语言的认知表征感兴趣的语言学家和对复兴感兴趣的社区成员都会感兴趣。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得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来支持。