Doctoral Dissertation Research: Blafe Documentation and Description

这笔赠款支持实地考察和研究记录纳玛语的项目，纳玛语是巴布亚新几内亚西部省使用的一种濒危语言，巴布亚新几内亚是世界上语言最多样化的国家之一，急需语言文献。Nama语大约有1200人使用，属于Morehead-Upper Maro家族，这是一个鲜为人知且没有记录的巴布亚少数民族语言群体。Nama很有趣，因为它表现出一套形态句法特征，这些特征在跨新几内亚（TNG）家族中未经证实，TNG家族是迄今为止最大和记录最广泛的巴布亚家族。此外，Nama使用了一个极其罕见的以6为基数的十进制系统，它被认为具有文化基础。Nama的文献将是一个重要的步骤，以提供一个更细粒度的巴布亚语言的特征和发展一个更全面的新几内亚地区的语言变化的说明。它还将在外部研究人员和Nama社区之间建立重要的联系，并将证实Nama在当地人口中的重要性。该项目将对Nama进行广泛和多方面的描述：详细介绍Nama的句法、形态和语音特性的综合参考语法；Nama-English词汇数据库，为今后编写双语词典奠定基础；可公开访问的在线语料库，包含母语人士的带注释的录音（例如，包含短篇故事、对话、叙述、引出的话语）；档案：文本和范例材料的档案；并且，研究论文分析形态句法特性具有理论意义。该项目还将有助于培养一名有前途的学者。

This grant supports the fieldwork and research for a project to document Nama, an endangered language spoken in Western Province, Papua New Guinea, one of the most linguistically diverse countries in the world where language documentation is critically needed. Spoken by around 1,200 people, Nama belongs to the Morehead-Upper Maro family, which is a poorly understood and undocumented minority Papuan language group. Nama is interesting because it exhibits a set of morphosyntactic properties which are unattested in the Trans-New Guinea (TNG) family, the largest and heretofore most extensively documented Papuan family. Furthermore, Nama uses an extremely rare senary numeral system with the base 6, which is assumed to have cultural underpinnings. The documentation of Nama will be an important step toward providing a more fine-grained characterization of Papuan languages and developing a more comprehensive account of linguistic variation in the New Guinea region. It will also establish significant ties between outside researchers and the Nama community and will validate the importance of Nama among the local population.This project will produce an extensive and multifaceted description of Nama: a comprehensive reference grammar detailing syntactic, morphological, and phonological properties of Nama; a Nama-English lexical database which will lay the foundation for the future compilation of a bilingual dictionary; a publicly accessible online corpus of annotated audio recordings of native speakers (containing, for example, short stories, conversations, narratives, elicited utterances); an archive of textual and paradigmatic materials; and, research papers analyzing morphosyntactic properties of theoretical significance. This project will also contribute to the scientific training of a promising scholar.