Doctoral Dissertation Research: Linguistic Analysis of Grammatical Constructions in Discourse about Civic and Economic Issues

该项目将解决社会、公民、经济和语言因素相互作用的复杂方式，以激发或阻止土著语言加速语言转变的过程。同时，它将记录一个特殊的流派。越来越多的证据表明，更专业的语言体裁和知识很容易流失。通过对特定语言元素的分析，该项目将为一种表现出高度复杂形态系统的濒危语言提供更多细节。由于该主题仅限于一种特定的专业演讲（国家事务），因此分析还将扩展有关社会语言学和其他因素在语言转变中的作用的知识，包括关于谁应该说一种语言，如何以及在哪里应该说的语言意识形态。重点将放在纳瓦特尔语（ISO 639-3 NHE）上，这是一种乌托-阿兹特克语，具有复杂的前缀和后缀形态，与话语的话语内容相互作用。这种复杂的词法（例如，与英语词法大不相同）为专门的文体如何与语言的特定方面相互作用创造了一个测试平台，这里有广泛的后缀和前缀过程，以及不同的说话者如何以不同的方式使用相同的语法元素。项目活动包括编写教学材料，为该村小学教师举办讲习班，培训两名母语人士学习语言文件编制方法。更广泛的影响包括培训一名博士生，在德克萨斯大学建立音频和视频记录和转录的公共存储库，奥斯汀的AILLA存储库，以及加强墨西哥和美国学者之间的合作。该项目将扩大对影响一种语言的维持或向另一种语言转换的语言和语言外因素的了解。该项目将收集墨西哥纳华社会中由女性、男性和混合群体组成的集会上的演讲视频和录音，以确定说服等修辞策略。这种语言在墨西哥的许多地方都有使用；该项目将专门记录位于该国中东部的品种。我们将根据不同的语法元素，以及隐喻、头韵、平行、回指和转喻等更“诗意”的结构，分析说话人的用法变化。通过分析这些以公民和经济为导向的类型的语法结构，CoPI将调查语言使用者在政策和公民主题演讲过程中如何使用政府语境中的语法结构和语言策略来实现社会目标。对这种特殊类型中经常出现的诸如方向或未来等语言类别的标记进行分析，将有助于更好地理解它们的语法特性，以及纳瓦特尔语使用者如何将这些结构用于不同目的。研究人员将使用语言人种学作为中心方法，辅以深入访谈。民族志是一种方法论，包括语言调查、参与观察和记录自发的说话互动。研究结果将不仅为语言学，而且为社会语言学、语言人类学和人类学提供见解。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。

The project will address the complex ways in which social, civic, economic, and linguistic factors interact to provoke or prevent the accelerated process of language shift of indigenous languages. Simultaneously, it will document a specialized genre. Growing evidence shows that more specialized genres and knowledge in languages are vulnerable to attrition. Through an analysis of particular linguistic elements, the project will provide greater detail about an endangered language that displays a highly complex morphological system. Because the topic is limited to a particular kind of specialized speech (the matters of state), the analysis will also expand knowledge about the role of sociolinguistic and other factors in the linguistic shift, including linguistic ideologies about who should speak a language, how and where it should be spoken. The focus will be on Nahuatl (ISO 639-3 NHE), a Uto-Aztecan language possessing a complex morphology of prefixes and suffixes that interacts with the discursive content of speech. This complex morphology (quite different than English morphology, for example) creates a testing bed for how specialized genres interact with specific aspects of a language, here extensive suffixing and prefixing processes, as well as how different speakers use the same grammatical elements in different ways. Project activities include the development of pedagogical materials, a workshop for elementary school teachers in the village, and the training of two native speakers in linguistic documentation methodologies. Broader impacts include the training of a doctoral student, a public repository of audio and video recordings and transcriptions archived at the University of Texas, Austin's AILLA repository, and the strengthening of collaborations between Mexican and American scholars. The project will expand knowledge about the linguistic and extra-linguistic factors that influence the maintenance or the shift of one language to another. The project will collect video and audio recordings of the oratory taking place in assemblies made up by women-only, men-only, and mixed groups from Nahua Mexican society to identify rhetorical strategies such as persuasion. This language is spoken in various parts of Mexico; this project will specifically document the variety located on the east-central side of the country. Usage will be analyzed for speaker variation as pertains to particular grammatical elements, as well as more "poetic" kinds of constructions such as metaphor, alliteration, parallelism, anaphora, and metonymy. Through the analyses of grammatical constructions in these civic- and economic-oriented genres, the CoPI will investigate how grammatical constructions and linguistic strategies used in governmental contexts are used by language users to accomplish social goals during the course of speeches on policy and civic topics. An analysis of the markers for linguistic categories like direction or future, frequently found in this specialized genre, will lead to a better understanding of their grammatical properties as well as how speakers of Nahuatl use these structures for different purposes. The researcher will use linguistic ethnography as the central methodology, supplemented by in-depth interviews. Ethnography is a methodology that includes linguistic investigation, participant observation, and recording of spontaneous speaking interactions. The results will provide insights not only for linguistics but also for sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and anthropology.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.