Doctoral Dissertation Research: A Reference Grammar of Kove

Kove是巴布亚新几内亚西新不列颠省使用的一种濒临灭绝的南岛语。该地区约有8000人居住，但许多人都不会说流利的库夫语。社区成员正在迅速丧失语言能力，转而使用托克文和英语作为交流的通用语。这种变化有几个原因：一般的现代化（例如，使用通用语言的大众媒体）；现在有更多的爱去上学，在那里英语是教学语言；增加与非爱语使用者的社会互动（例如，由于现代交通带来的流动性）。关于柯夫语和传统文化的知识不再以口头方式代代相传。本论文项目的目标是根据在实地考察期间收集的语料库中的启发和文本，制作一个参考语法和一个小字典。语料库将包括以音频和视频格式记录的叙述、公共事件和对话。文本将转录和注释国际音标转录，行间注释，并翻译成两托克语和英语。由于目前存在的关于Kove和相关语言的文献很少，语法和伴随的词汇不仅对语言学有价值，而且对人类学、历史学、神学和音乐学等领域也有价值。语法和词汇也将作为Kove社区教育材料的基础，并将有助于促进扫盲工作。

Kove is an endangered Austronesian language spoken in the West New Britain province of Papua New Guinea. About 8,000 people live in the area, but many are not fluent speakers of Kove. Community members are rapidly losing language competence and switching to the use of Tok Pisin and English as lingua francas for communication. This change has several causes: modernization in general (e.g., use of lingua franca mass media); the fact that more Kove now go to school, where English is the language of instruction; and increasing social interaction with non-Kove speakers (e.g., due to the mobility brought by modern transportation). Knowledge of the Kove language and traditional culture is no longer being transmitted orally from one generation to the next.The goal of this dissertation project is to produce a reference grammar and a small dictionary, based on elicitation and texts in a corpus collected during fieldtrips. The corpus will include narratives, public events, and conversations recorded in both audio and video formats. Texts will be transcribed and annotated with IPA transcriptions, interlinear glosses, and translations into both Tok Pisin and English. Since very little documentation of Kove and related languages currently exists, the grammar and accompanying vocabulary will be of value not only to linguistics, but also fields such as anthropology, history, theology, and musicology, among others. The grammar and vocabulary will also serve as the basis for the Kove community's educational materials and will help promote literacy efforts.