Documenting Mayan Language Acquisition

儿童具有习得任何人类语言的惊人能力。这种能力远远超过了当今最快的超级计算机的能力，鉴于世界语言之间的根本结构差异，这一能力尤其令人惊讶。语言习得现象是语言学家寻找语言共性的主要动机，但如果不仔细记录目前世界语言之间存在的差异，这种探索就不会成功。不幸的是，世界上绝大多数语言将在一代人的时间内灭绝。记录这些濒危语言将有助于保存人类智力成就的独特产品，并支持对儿童惊人的语言壮举的更深层次理解。该项目将用三种玛雅语言记录采购过程。现在是记录玛雅语言习得的关键时刻，而仍有儿童在传统环境中学习玛雅语言。玛雅语言在许多关键的语言层面上与欧洲语言不同。最重要的是玛雅的作格约定系统，它标志着及物动词的主语与不及物动词的主语不同。该项目将建立一个语言基础设施，用于记录和转录三个玛雅社区的儿童语言样本。来自目标社区并说所在社区语言(S)的接受过语言培训的学生将负责进行研究。该项目的另一个目标是建立一个玛雅语言的比较习得基地，以便比较历史变化过程和语言习得过程。

Children have the astonishing capacity to acquire any human language. This capacity far outstrips the ability of today's fastest supercomputers, and is especially surprising in light of fundamental structural differences that separate the world's languages. The language acquisition phenomenon is a central motivation in linguists' search for language universals, but this search cannot succeed without careful documentation of the variation that presently exists among the world's languages. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the world's languages will go extinct in a generation. The documentation of these endangered languages will help preserve a unique product of human intellectual achievement as well as support a deeper understanding of children's amazing linguistic feat. This project will document the acquisition process in three Mayan languages. This is a critical time to document the acquisition of Mayan languages while there are still children acquiring them in traditional settings. Mayan languages differ from European languages on many key linguistic dimensions. Of prime importance is the Mayan system of ergative agreement which marks the subject of transitive verbs differently from the subject of intransitive verbs. The project will establish a linguistic infrastructure for recording and transcribing samples of children's language in three Mayan communities.Students with linguistic training who come from the targeted communities and who speak the language(s) of their community will be responsible for conducting the research. A further goal of the project is to establish a comparative acquisition base for the Mayan languages to facilitate comparison between processes of historical change and language acquisition.