REG: Morphological Investigations in Formosan Languages

该项目的目的是记录濒危南岛语泰雅语在形态、句法和音系方面的罕见类型，并将其结构与同属塞西亚族的另一种濒危语言的结构进行比较。主要的研究目标是：1)更好地理解信息结构--句子的主题焦点结构--如何与词序和韵律的独立约束相互作用；2)了解这些语言中存在的一些特殊的构词类型过程。所研究的语言将为我们提供有关词和句子的语言结构的重要信息，有助于我们对认知过程有更深的理解。由于这些语言很可能在几代人之后不再使用，所以在它们消失之前记录它们是很重要的，特别是因为这些语言在类型学上有罕见的现象，这可能对我们对语言结构的理解特别有帮助。该项目将在一个详细的实验环境中探索韵律线索如何标记赛西亚特的信息结构，该实验将1)调查居住在台湾新竹附近的多名母语人士对其语言句子的可接受性判断，以及2)记录母语人士使用不同的词序阅读问答语篇(S)。Saisiyat，一种主语-动词-宾语语言，以及泰雅语，一种动词-主语-宾语语言，提供了丰富的语序可能性和韵律突出度的比较。该研究项目还将研究罕见的构词过程，即复制单个辅音并将其与单词组合，以指示语法功能。

The goal of this project is to document the typologically rare morphological, syntactic and phonological patterns of the endangered Austronesian Language Atayal, and to compare its structure to that of another endangered language from the same family Saisiyat. The primary research objectives are: 1) to gain a better understanding of how information structure - the topic-focus structuring of the sentence - interacts with independent constraints on word order and with prosody; 2) to understand some typologically exceptional processes of word formation present in these languages. The languages investigated will provide us with important information about the linguistic structure of words and sentences, which helps us gain deeper understanding of cognitive processing. Since these languages are likely to no longer be spoken in a few generations it is important to document them now before they disappear, especially because these languages have typologically rare phenomena that may be especially informative to our understanding of linguistic structure. The project will explore how prosodic cues mark information structure in Saisiyat, in a detailed experimental setting that will 1) survey multiple native speakers, residing near Hsinchu, Taiwan, for acceptability judgments of sentences in their language, and 2) document native speakers reading question-answer discourse using the different word order(s). Saisiyat, an Subject-Verb-Object language, and Atayal, a Verb-Subject-Object language, providing for a rich comparison of word order possibilities and prosodic prominence. The research project will also investigate rare processes of word-formation, where single consonants are duplicated and combined to the word to indicate a grammatical function.