Sora Typological Characteristics: Towards a Re-Evaluation of South Asian Human History

该项目将对印度南部奥迪萨邦几个地区30多万人口的土著“部落”人所说的索拉语进行全面研究。该项目侧重于苍井空的语音系统、语法和词汇的特点，这些特点在不同的重要方面脱颖而出，既有该地区的相关语言，也有该地区的其他语言。这些分析将为南亚和东南亚地区当前关于语言接触和语言变化的辩论以及当前的语言类型学工作提供信息(并从中获得信息)，并可能需要重新阐述南亚的史前情况。苍井空提出了几个具有挑战性的特点，包括一种可能是独特的名词并入形式，而这种形式被明确预测为不可能的。一旦更好地理解了苍井空的这些细节，并分析了它随时间的变化，就会出现对南亚模糊的语言史前的新见解。该项目还为土著科学家作为关键团队成员在研究中发挥重要作用提供了独特的机会，从而为一些服务最少和代表性最低的科学家群体提供了能力建设和STEM实地研究机会。它还有助于提高土著人民的知名度，他们的历史在南亚区域历史的主流记述中被遗漏了。该项目将编写《苍井空的语法》(包括文本、各种苍井空方言的比较词汇和语法)，并建立一个详尽的苍井空方言材料注释档案。这些将通过以音频和视频格式记录的自发叙述录音和与发言者的有针对性的启发相结合的方式收集。将探讨的主题包括表达词汇，这是苍井空一个高度发达的系统，有许多被证明的复杂重叠模式，以及在不同动词类别中看到的语法一致系统。我们还将研究可能伴随着德拉威人和雅利安人迁徙到南亚的类型变化，这些变化使已经在那里的群体边缘化，例如索拉人的原始蒙达人祖先，以及库松达人的祖先语言到外围。这些类型学上的转变可能已经淹没或取代了可能更广泛的旧特征。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This project will provide a comprehensive study of the Sora language, spoken by an indigenous 'tribal' people in India with a population of over 300,000, located in several districts of southern Odisha State. This project focuses on the features of Sora's sound system, grammar and vocabulary which stand out in various significant ways, both from related languages and other languages of the region. These analyses will inform (and be informed by) current debates in language contact and language change in the South Asian and Southeast Asian regions, as well as by current work in linguistic typology, and may necessitate a reformulation of the prehistory of South Asia. Sora presents several challenging features, including a possibly unique form of noun incorporation that has been explicitly predicted to be impossible. Once these details of Sora are better understood, and its changes over time have been analyzed, new insights into the murky linguistic pre-history of South Asia will emerge. The project also offers unique opportunities for indigenous scientists to play major roles in the research as key team members, thus offering capacity building and STEM field research opportunities to some of the most underserved and underrepresented communities of scientists. It also helps promote the visibility of indigenous peoples whose histories have been missing from mainstream accounts of regional South Asian history. The project will produce A Grammar of Sora (with texts, a comparative lexicon and grammar of the various Sora dialects) and create an exhaustive, annotated archival deposit of the Sora dialect materials. These are to be collected through a combination of spontaneous narrative recordings and targeted elicitation with speakers, recorded in audio and video format. Topics to be explored include the 'expressive' lexicon, which is a highly developed system in Sora with many attested complex reduplication patterns, as well as the systems of grammatical agreement seen in different verb classes. We will also examine the typological shifts that may have accompanied the Dravidian and Aryan migrations into South Asia that marginalized the groups already there, such as the Proto-Munda ancestors to the Sora, and the ancestral language to Kusunda to the periphery. These typological shifts may have submerged or replaced what may have been more widespread older features.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.