Typological research on the morphosyntax of the Native languages of the Northwest Coast of North America

在这个研究项目中，几乎所有的参与者都能够在三年的时间里在加拿大进行实地考察。我们能够在我们自己之间以及与国外的语言学家讨论这项研究的各个方面。这个项目中研究的所有语言(斯利蒙语、努特卡语、海达语和海岸津西亚语)只有有限数量的说老年语言的人说，因此面临消失的危险。因此，通过这个项目收集的语言数据作为这些语言的记录是非常有价值的。然而，本研究的目的不仅是记录这些语言，而且对它们的形态句法特征进行跨语言比较。北美西北海岸的语言形成了一个“语言区”，共享许多语言现象，其中许多是不常见的，是普通语言学非常感兴趣的。通过这个项目，我们认识到，在类型学问题中，多重综合的概念是相当有问题的，而且出人意料地复杂。根据词法类型学，本项目研究的所有语言都被归类为多合成语言。综合语素通常被定义为一种语言，在这种语言中，一个词可以由许多语素组成，因此一个词可以包含许多概念，形成在其他类型的语言中用许多单独的词在一个句子中表达的概念。然而，尽管这些语言明显属于综合类型，但它们高度综合的表现形式却截然不同。通过这个项目，我们能够澄清这些语言的某些特征，关于是什么使它们成为多元合成的，我们也开始理解这个复杂的多元合成概念问题。

In this research project, almost all the participants were able to conduct fieldwork in Canada during the three year period. We were able to discuss various aspects of the research among ourselves and also with linguists abroad. All the languages studied in this project (Sliammon, Nootka, Haida, and Coast Tshimshian) are spoken by a limited number of elderly speakers, and are therefore in danger of disappearing. The linguistic data gathered through this project, therefore, is invaluable as a record of these languages.The goal of this research was, however, not only to document the languages in question, but to conduct a cross-linguistic comparison of their morph syntactic traits. The languages of the Northwest Coast of North America form a 'language area' that shares a number of language phenomena, many of which are uncommon and of great interest to general linguistics. Such phenomena include 'polysynthesis' and the problem of classifying word-classes.Through this project, we came to realize that, among the typological questions, the notion of polysynthesis is quite problematic and unexpectedly complex. All the languages studied in this project are classified as polysynthetic, according to the morphological typology. 'Polysynthetic' is usually defined as a language in which a word may be formed with many morphemes, and thus one word may contain many concepts forming what would be expressed in a sentence with many separate words in other types of languages. However, although the languages in question clearly belong to the polysynthetic type, their manifestation of the high degree of synthesis is quite different from one another. Through this project, we were able to clarify certain characteristics of these languages as regards what make them polysynthetic, and also we began to understand this complex question of the notion of polysynthesis.