Documenting Mayan Language Acquisition

儿童具有惊人的学习任何人类语言的能力。这种能力远远超过了当今最快的超级计算机的能力，考虑到世界上不同语言之间的基本结构差异，这种能力尤其令人惊讶。语言习得现象是语言学家寻找语言共性的主要动机，但如果没有对目前世界语言之间存在的差异进行仔细的记录，这种寻找就不可能成功。不幸的是，世界上绝大多数语言将在一代人的时间内灭绝。这些濒危语言的记录将有助于保护人类智力成就的独特产物，并有助于更深入地了解儿童惊人的语言壮举。该项目将用三种玛雅语言记录采集过程。这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习得这些语言。玛雅语言在许多关键的语言维度上与欧洲语言不同。最重要的是玛雅系统的否定一致，它标志着及物动词的主语不同于不及物动词的主语。该项目将建立一个语言基础设施，用于记录和抄写三个玛雅社区儿童语言的样本。来自目标社区并说其社区语言的受过语言训练的学生将负责进行研究。该项目的另一个目标是建立玛雅语言的比较习得基础，以促进历史变化和语言习得过程之间的比较。

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.