Doctoral Dissertation Research: Documenting the Semantics of Verbal and Nominal Tense in an Endangered Language

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This dissertation project involves detailed fieldwork and audio and video documentation of Mvskoke (a.k.a. Muskogee, Creek, Seminole), a severely endangered language indigenous to the Southeastern United States, currently spoken by about 500 individuals in Oklahoma and Florida. This project focuses on the unique ways that this language expresses time. Linguists use the term ‘tense’ to refer to words or affixes that reference time – specifically past, present, and future time. It has classically been assumed that tense (i) communicates one of those three values, (ii) refers only to intervals of time, and (iii) only appears on verbs. However, in recent years, linguists have uncovered facts and phenomena that challenge these three assumptions. First, a number of languages have so-called ‘graded’ tenses, which communicate how far into the past or future something happens. Secondly, in some languages certain tenses can only be used if the speaker witnessed the event. Finally, in a few languages, tenses can appear on nouns as well as verbs. Remarkably, all three of these phenomena are present in this language, which has four past tenses that appear on both nouns and verbs; moreover, the choice of tense depends on whether the speaker witnessed the event and how long ago it occurred. Previous linguistic research on tense has been limited to languages exhibiting just one of these three phenomena. This study will examine all three phenomena in the tense system of the language, including their possible interactions. The research will be based on interviews with fluent elders and the doctoral student will compile multiple recordings (audio and video) of conversations between elders and between elders and students. The results of this project will further the understanding of tense and will directly benefit the community language revitalization efforts by providing documentation of the tenses as used in everyday conversation.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.