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

职业：四种语言的多词声调与和声系统的记录、描述和分析

• 批准号: 2236768
• 负责人: Hannah Sande
• 金额: $ 53.7万
• 依托单位: University of California-Berkeley
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2023
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2023-06-01 至 2028-05-31
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2236768&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CAREER; Documentation; description; analysis; multiword

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.

这个职业项目调查了四种未被学习的语言的语言系统。在该项目的每一年，PI都会培训一个本科生和研究生的语言文档方法团队，该团队会与每种目标语言的社区一起工作。该团队记录每种语言的自然语音，并引出特定的单词和句子，以便记录语法的各个方面。记录下来的材料被存档在加州语言档案馆，将语言数据保存到未来，以便语言学家、其他学者和演讲者社区使用。这项工作填补了一个经验空白，记录了未被研究的语言的语法，这是为目标语言开发语言资源以及语言理论和类型学的重要的第一步。它对我们理解语言是如何工作的也有重要的意义。该项目加强了学者之间现有的国际关系，并与农村社区建立了关系，促进了文化交流和理解。它还为本地和国际学生提供培训，有助于下一代语言研究人员的发展和多样化。本项目研究的四种语言都显示了跨越单词边界的特定语素的语音过程。在一种语言中，不完成体的标志是语气的变化，影响到动词和句子的主语。语素特定的跨词音系学在不同语言中没有很好的文献记载，所以这项研究开始填补类型学知识的空白。此外，大多数关于词法和音系学之间相互作用的正式理论都预测，特定语素的音系学应该局限于单词或亚词域。来自这四种语言的和声和声调的数据表明，这是一个错误的预测。更深入地理解跨词语素特定音位的界限，以及它们是否与形态合成或韵律边界一致，有助于关于需要什么正式机制来解释跨语言词法和音位之间的互动的辩论。这一奖项反映了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。