Doctoral Dissertation Research: Analyzing the morphophonology and morphosemantics of an endangered language

这个博士论文项目专注于创建语言基础设施，记录一种濒临灭绝和研究不足的语言。这份文档将使博士生能够对该语言进行广泛的语法描述，并对该语言的音位和语义进行分析。对世界语言语法的易懂、数据驱动的描述使语言学家能够提出和评估关于人类语言形式的变化、语言如何随时间变化以及不同语言社区之间的历史关系的理论和主张。记录属于像这种语言这样的小而孤立的语系的濒危语言是语言学中的一项重要努力，因为这种语言包含许多独特的和未描述的语法特征，可以扩大我们对人类语言本质的理解。语言文献还使少数群体和土著社区能够长期呈现社区知识和生活方式，并建立语言基础设施，以此作为语言振兴和维护工作的基础。该项目与当地教师和语言工作者密切合作，建设学术和技术能力，这将有助于维护和体制化迄今为止在社会上被边缘化的语言。这位博士生将与以英语为母语的人进行实地考察，努力提高现有文本和语言录音的翻译和注释质量，并与广泛的参与者一起创建新的视频记录。这一改进和扩展的文件语料库将为学生的论文提供信息，其中包括从类型学角度看语言的参考语法，采用基于文件的语言描述的最佳做法。这种语言属于一种语系，它在土著语言的一些共同特征上表现出独特的变化：高度合成的和语音融合的动词形态，广泛的方向和关联运动系统，名词化作为动词从属的主要手段，以及通过语法化系统表示认知语气、证据和立场的语义复杂手段。博士生的论文将对这些语言的区域类型学做出贡献，并将对区域语言学文献中正在讨论的主要主题敏感，同时也旨在创建一种对语言类型学家和理论家具有最广泛用途和可及性的语法描述。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。

This doctoral dissertation project focuses on creating language infrastructure that documents an endangered and under-studied language. This documentation will enable the doctoral student to develop a wide-ranging grammatical description of the language, and to conduct analysis of the phonology and semantics of the language. Accessible, data-driven descriptions of the grammar of world languages allows linguists to make and evaluate theories and claims regarding the variation in form of human language, how languages change over time, and the historical relationships between different speech communities. The documentation of endangered languages which belong to small, isolated language families such as this language is a critical endeavor in linguistics as such languages contain many unique and undescribed grammatical features which can expand our understanding of the nature of human language. Language documentation also permits minority and indigenous communities to create long-lasting representations of community knowledge and life ways, and to build a language infrastructure on which to base language revitalization and maintenance work. This project works closely with local teachers and language workers, building academic and technical capacity which will aid in the maintenance and institutionalization of the language which until now has suffered marginalization in society. The doctoral student will conduct fieldwork with native speakers working to improve the quality of translation and annotation of existing texts and recordings of the language, as well as creating new video recordings with a wide range of participants. This improved and expanded documentary corpus will inform the student's dissertation, which consists of a reference grammar of the language in typological perspective, employing best practices in documentation-based language description. This language belongs to a language family which exhibits unique variations on a number of common traits of indigenous languages: highly synthetic and phonologically fusional verb morphology, extensive directional and associated motion systems, nominalization as the primary means of verbal subordination, and semantically complex means of indicating epistemic mood, evidentiality, and stance through grammaticalized systems. The doctoral student's dissertation will contribute to the regional typology of these languages, and will be sensitive to major topics of ongoing discussion in the regional linguistics literature, while also aiming to create a grammatical description that is of the broadest possible use and accessibility to language typologists and theorists.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.