Navajo Reference Grammar

在国家科学基金会的支持下，西奥多博士B。Fernald和Ellington Tsosie Perkins将对纳瓦霍语进行为期三年的语言学研究，纳瓦霍语是亚利桑那州东北部和邻近地区使用的一种濒临灭绝的阿萨巴斯卡语。他们将创建一个参考语法借鉴纳瓦霍句子结构的先前研究，并补充这些材料与其句法和语义的原始分析，以填补在早期研究的空白。虽然高质量的参考资料可用于纳瓦霍语动词的内部结构，纳瓦霍语句子结构的系统描述是在文献中缺乏。拟议的参考语法将涵盖所有已知的纳瓦霍语句子类型的结构，意义和使用。其中包括逆结构、直接和间接话语结构、存在句和对等句、疑问句、命令句和条件句。语法中的语法将被简化，早期说明概括，后期添加复杂性和例外情况。每一节的末尾都有大量的例子和附加说明，读者可以忽略这些例子和说明。纳瓦霍语是北美最大的母语社区，大约有8万到10万人。但这种语言一般不会传给最年轻的一代。除了对该语言感兴趣的语言学家外，教育工作者和课程规划者也可以使用该项目编制的参考语法。因此，它将帮助社区努力加强纳瓦霍语的使用，并保持其丰富的语言和文学传统。参考语法也将成为语言学家测试语法现象分析的资源，并进一步描述纳瓦霍语如何融入人类语言谱。

With National Science Foundation support, Drs. Theodore B. Fernald and Ellvina Tsosie Perkins will conduct three years of linguistic research on Navajo, an endangered Athabaskan language spoken in northeastern Arizona and neighboring regions. They will create a reference grammar drawing on previous studies of Navajo sentence structure and supplementing these materials with original analyses of its syntax and semantics to fill in gaps in the earlier research. While high quality reference materials are available for the internal structure of Navajo verbs, a systematic description of Navajo sentence structure is absent in the literature. The proposed reference grammar will cover the structure, meaning, and use of all known Navajo sentence types. Among these will be the inverse construction, direct and indirect discourse constructions, existential and equative sentences, questions, commands, and conditionals. Entries in the grammar will be streamlined, with generalizations stated early and with complications and exceptions added later. A wide range of examples and additional notes that can be ignored by readers seeking a quick overview will appear at the end of each section.With roughly 80,000 to 100,000 native speakers, Navajo is the largest native speech community in North America. But the language is generally not being passed on to the youngest generation. The reference grammar to be produced by this project will be accessible to educators and curriculum planners, in addition to linguists interested in the language. It will thus aid community efforts to strengthen the use of Navajo and maintain its rich linguistic and literary tradition. The reference grammar will also be a resource for linguists to test analyses of grammatical phenomena and to further describe how Navajo fits into the spectrum of human languages.