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

这个博士论文项目的重点是创建语言基础设施，记录濒危和研究不足的语言。该文档将使博士生能够开发语言的广泛语法描述，并对语言的语音和语义进行分析。对世界语言语法的可解释的、数据驱动的描述使语言学家能够提出和评估有关人类语言形式变化、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。濒危语言的文件属于小，孤立的语言家庭，如这种语言是一个关键的奋进，在语言学，因为这些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的性质的理解。 语言文献还使少数群体和土著社区能够创造社区知识和生活方式的持久表现，并建立语言基础设施，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，这将有助于维护迄今为止在社会中处于边缘地位的语言并使其制度化。博士生将与母语人士进行实地考察，以提高现有文本和语言记录的翻译和注释质量，并与广泛的参与者一起创建新的视频记录。这种改进和扩展的文献语料库将通知学生的论文，其中包括一个参考语法的语言类型学的角度来看，采用最佳做法，在基于文档的语言描述。这种语言属于一个在土著语言的一些共同特征上表现出独特变化的语言家族：高度合成和语音融合的动词形态，广泛的方向和相关运动系统，名词化作为动词从属的主要手段，以及通过语法化系统指示认知语气，证据和立场的语义复杂手段。博士生的论文将有助于这些语言的区域类型学，并将对区域语言学文献中正在讨论的主要话题敏感，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学术价值和更广泛的影响审查标准。

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.