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

这个项目调查了西南部奥吉布韦的说话者如何使用这种语言的独特语法特征来理解复杂的句子。西南部的奥吉布韦是一种振兴的土著语言，在明尼苏达州、威斯康星州和安大略省南部约有5000名讲第一和第二语言的人说。它的语法已经被研究了几十年，但人们对说话者在正常语言理解和产出过程中如何产生和理解Ojibwe句子知之甚少。这是当前项目的重点。具体地说，这项研究解决了听者是否使用奥吉布特定的语法线索来预测句子的意义将如何解析的问题，重点是奥吉布语者使用什么类型的信息来识别句子的语法主语。这个项目加入了一个规模不大但正在增长的研究机构，通过实验田野工作来研究濒危和研究不足的语言，并扩大了我们对如何利用所有人类共同的认知能力来产生和理解语法表达方式不同的语言的理解。此外，这项研究的结果将与西南部奥吉布维语社区分享，以支持语言复兴的努力。所有语言都可以指有生命的(有生命的)和非有生命的(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，名词根据它们是指有生命的实体还是无生命的实体而得到不同的语法标记。此外，动画名词还参与了一个独特的“聚光灯”系统。当一个故事、对话或话语中有多个动画名词时，其中一个被指定为最接近的(聚光灯下的角色)，而所有其他的被标记为明显(聚光灯外的角色)。Ojibwe与英语等语言的进一步不同之处在于，词序不是理解句子意思的主要线索。相反，Ojibwe有一个复杂的系统，在这个系统中，动词的一致形式和名词的有生命/无保留信息一起使用来理解句子的意义。这项拟议的研究将着眼于Ojibwe说话者如何利用这些信息来源来了解谁在做特定的行动，谁正在经历行动。将采用两种方法。首先，一项语言生成任务，即给说话者一个不完整的句子前言，并要求他们用它来组成完整的句子，将被用来确定说话者对歧义名词的语法作用做出了什么假设。第二，语言理解任务，参与者将一边听奥吉布韦的句子，一边看一系列对应于对句子的不同解释的图片。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。这项拟议的研究是关于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将感兴趣。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。

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.