Doctoral Dissertation Research: A Reference Grammar of a Typologically Diverse Language

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Language is the most unique characteristic of the human species. In order to develop an understanding of human language, the discipline of linguistics requires detailed information about languages that are significantly different from the more familiar languages that were studied in the past. This project will produce a grammatical description of Chepang, an endangered language spoken in Central Nepal by around 48,000 people. Chepang belongs to the Sino-Tibetan family, which also includes Chinese, Tibetan, and Burmese. Chepang shows grammatical patterns which are very unusual in the world's languages. To take one important example, Chepang sentences do not have the same kind of subjects and objects as English or most other languages. In Chepang, verb agreement follows a very complex "hierarchical" pattern in which any first or second person argument of the clause, whether subject, object, or even the possessor of a subject or object, governs agreement (so that in the Chepang translation of the sentence "She scolded your child" the verb would agree with "you", not with the subject of the sentence). Languages like this are very rare; they include a few Native languages of North America, a few in South America, and a few Sino-Tibetan languages of the Himalayas. It is important to document this kind of unusual grammar in order to understand the full range of possible human language. The project will bring U.S. resources into Nepal and do some capacity building, acting like a type of "soft power" in a region where other foreign countries are making extensive connections of their own. The analysis of the language produced in the doctoral dissertation will serve as a foundation to create pedagogical materials for future mother-tongue based multilingual education programs. Broader impacts also include training and research experience for the doctoral student who will carry out the fieldwork and write the grammar.The project will produce a reference grammar of Chepang [ISO 639-3:cdm], generating a detailed description of the phonological and grammatical structures of the language, and a transcribed set of spoken narratives. Doctoral student Marie-Caroline Pons will work in close collaboration with members of different Chepang communities who live in the plains and hills of Makawanpur district, to audio/video record, transcribe, and translate a wide varieties of genres that will document the language, history, and life of the Chepang people, including narratives, ethnographical expository and procedural texts, as well as natural conversational interactions. Chepang has a number of grammatical features which are of great historical and theoretical interest, including the verbal agreement system mentioned above. At present very few full descriptions of languages of this kind exist, and there is debate in the field about how such languages work, and how this pattern relates to what occurs in more familiar languages. Because language documentation of this kind can only be carried out in a community of speakers, recording conversations and narratives from elders who are fluent speakers, the project requires extended research in Nepal. In addition to its contributions to the science of linguistics, and to our knowledge of Asian prehistory and Tibeto-Burman language change, the grammar which will be produced will be of considerable value to the Chepang community in the preservation of their language.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.