Doctoral Dissertation Research: The grammar and use of elaborate verb morphology by elderly monolinguals

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The way bilinguals and monolingual elders speak an endangered indigenous language is not uniform. Bilinguals are typically more dominant in one of their two languages, in most cases not their indigenous one but the national or dominant language in their country of origin. Monolingual speakers differ from bilinguals in having one single, fully developed, linguistic system. This difference can be seen in their use of words, especially complex verbs, since a range of semantic nuances that are idiosyncratic to their speech are displayed. The speech of elderly monolinguals in indigenous languages is vanishing as villages decrease in population, leading to significant losses of cultural diversity. In this dissertation project, the doctoral student will document naturalistic spoken monolingual speech and provide an in-depth analysis of the grammar and the semantics of verbal morphology in a particular monolingual variety that will allow answering questions such as: What is the verbal morphology of elderly monolinguals like and what grammar underlies such complex systems? What semantic information is prominently displayed through the verbs used by monolinguals that is not present in bilingual speech? These questions remain just loosely explored in current literature. The results of this project will enhance understanding of the diversity of endangered indigenous languages as it brings into the analysis monolingual systems which are morphologically more elaborate, thus allowing researchers to evaluate different cross-linguistic theories of morphologically complex languages. Since the doctoral student is bilingual, data collection will include her participation in everyday conversations. This interactive process will guarantee gathering real speech while spontaneously interacting with elderly monolinguals. Complementary elicited data will also be gathered to help achieve a better understanding of the semantics of verbal morphology. The naturalistic data corpus collected will be transcribed, annotated and analyzed, and will then be curated and deposited in a digital archive for the use of a wide range of stakeholders including indigenous language speakers, linguists, and other researchers.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.