Documentation and Analysis of Discourse in Cheyenne, a Native American language

美洲的土著语言是一种重要的国家资源。美国国会于1990年通过了《美洲原住民语言法案》，将承认美洲原住民语言的独特地位和重要性制定为政策。然而，这些语言中有许多文献记录不足，现有的文献可能分散且难以访问，阻碍了语言学习和研究的努力。该项目将解决这一挑战，并将创建夏安语的分析转录和翻译的数字语料库，夏安语是一种濒危的阿尔冈琴语，目前没有公开的在线语料库或数据库。语料库将形成一个在线的、可搜索的数据库，由部落学院托管。这将使广大读者可以使用该数据库进行新的查询，寻找社区语言和文化振兴的资源，以及测试先前语言研究结果的可重复性和稳健性。除了通过开发一种重要的语言和文化资源来支持一种土著语言外，该项目还将增加对语言科学的参与。该项目汇集了一所部落学院的语言学家、学生和工作人员、说流利夏延语的人以及夏延社区的其他成员，通过语言文献和技术以及语言分析方面的培训，扩大了社会科学方面的能力。该项目由美国国家科学基金会部落学院和大学计划（TCUP）共同资助。这个项目将使大量的夏安语文本能够被广泛获取，并将夏安人目前无法获得的夏安故事带回家。现有的Cheyenne文档包括至少可以追溯到20世纪40年代的文本，但是目前没有一个单一的文档存储库。该项目建议将现有的夏延族文本从出版材料和档案中收集到一个在线的、可搜索的、音频增强的数据库中，该数据库由酋长钝刀学院（CDKC）托管，该学院是北部夏延族的部落学院。该项目还将通过调查夏安语篇的微妙语义和语用特征，包括句子连接词、语篇小品和排除，增加现有文献的覆盖范围，这些特征以前从未被详细研究过。夏延语篇的这些重要特征正在迅速消失，从语义和语用的角度研究它们有可能揭示以前未记载的现象。这项研究也将促进语言科学的发展，有助于我们对这些现象的跨语言理解，并将来自一种未被充分研究的语言的数据用于主要针对英语开发的理论。所有文本将被标准化和语言分析链接到任何现有的音频文件。文本将以各种形式显示，用于不同的目的，包括研究、语言学习和语言材料开发。这种数据库对夏延族语文教师和学习者以及语言学家都是有用的，它将建立一个收集和传播未来文本和语文材料的结构。这个项目是首席钝刀学院和康奈尔大学的合作项目。

The indigenous languages of America are a vital national resource. The Native American Languages Act, passed by the U.S. Congress in 1990, enacted into policy the recognition of the unique status and importance of Native American languages. However, many of these languages are under-documented and existing documentation can be scattered and difficult to access, hampering language learning efforts and research. This project will address that challenge and will create a digital corpus of analyzed transcriptions and translations of Cheyenne, an endangered Algonquian language for which no publicly available online corpus or database currently exists. The corpus will result in an online, searchable database, hosted at a tribal college. This will make the database available for a wide audience to make new queries, to find resources for language and cultural revitalization by the community, as well as to test the reproducibility and robustness of prior findings on the language. In addition to supporting an indigenous language with the development of a crucial language and cultural resource, this project will increase engagement in the language sciences. The project brings together linguists, students and staff from a tribal college, fluent speakers of Cheyenne, and other members of the Cheyenne community, broadening capacity in the social sciences by training in language documentation and technology as well as linguistic analysis. The project is co-funded by the NSF Tribal Colleges and Universities Program (TCUP).This project will make a large corpus of Cheyenne language texts widely accessible and bring home Cheyenne stories that are not currently available to the Cheyenne people. Existing documentation of Cheyenne includes texts dating back at least to the 1940s, but there is currently no single repository for this documentation. This project proposes to collect together existing Cheyenne texts from published materials and archives into an online, searchable, audio-enhanced database, hosted at Chief Dull Knife College (CDKC), the tribal college of the Northern Cheyenne Nation. The project will also increase the coverage of existing documentation by investigating subtle semantic and pragmatic features of Cheyenne discourse, including sentential connectives, discourse particles, and obviation, which have never been studied in detail before. These important features of Cheyenne discourse are rapidly being lost and studying them from a semantic and pragmatic perspective has the potential to reveal previously undocumented phenomena. This investigation will also advance linguistic science, contributing to our cross-linguistic understanding of these phenomena and bringing data from an understudied language to bear on theories primarily developed for English. All texts will be standardized and linguistically analyzed linked with any existing audio files. Texts will be displayed in a variety of formats for different purposes, including research, language learning, and language material development. Such a database will be useful to Cheyenne language teachers and learners as well as linguists, and it will put in place a structure for the collection and dissemination of future texts and language materials. This project is a collaboration between Chief Dull Knife College and Cornell University.