CAREER: Documentation, description, and analysis of multiword tone and harmony systems in four languages

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This CAREER project investigates the linguistic system of four understudied languages. Each year of the project, the PI trains a team of undergraduate and graduate students in language documentation methods, and the team travels to work with communities of each of the target languages. The team records natural speech in each language and elicits specific words and sentences in order to document aspects of the grammar. The recorded materials are archived in the California Language Archive, preserving language data into the future so that they are available to linguists, other academics, and speaker communities. This work fills an empirical gap, documenting the grammar of understudied languages, which is an important first step for developing language resources for the target languages, as well as for linguistic theory and typology. It also has important implications for our understanding of how languages work. The project strengthens existing international relationships between academics and builds relationships with rural communities, fostering cultural exchange and understanding. It also provides training to both local and international students, contributing to the development and diversification of the next generation of language researchers.The four languages studied in this project all display morpheme-specific phonological processes that cross word boundaries. In one language, the imperfective aspect is marked by a shift in tone that affects the verb as well as the subject of the sentence. Morpheme-specific cross-word phonology is not well documented across languages, so this study begins to fill a gap in typological knowledge. Additionally, most formal theories of the interaction between morphology and phonology predict that morpheme-specific phonology should be limited to word or sub-word domains. The data from harmony and tone in these four languages shows this is an incorrect prediction. A deeper understanding of the boundaries of cross-word morpheme-specific phonology, and whether they align with morphosyntactic or prosodic boundaries, informs debates on what formal mechanisms are needed to account for interactions between morphology and phonology across languages.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.