Doctoral Dissertation Research: The role of animacy and obviation in the processing of Ojibwe relative clauses

这个项目调查了说西南奥吉布韦语的人如何使用这种语言独特的语法特征来理解复杂的句子。西南奥吉布语是一种正在复兴的土著语言，在明尼苏达州、威斯康星州和安大略省南部约有5000名第一和第二语言使用者。它的语法已经被研究了几十年，但很少有人知道说话者在正常的语言理解和生产过程中是如何产生和理解Ojibwe句子的。这是当前项目的重点。具体来说，这项研究解决了听众是否使用Ojibwe特定的语法线索来预测句子的含义将如何解决的问题，重点关注Ojibwe使用者使用哪些类型的信息来识别句子的语法主语。这个项目加入了一个规模虽小但不断增长的研究机构，该研究机构通过实地实验考察濒危和未被充分研究的语言，并扩展了我们对人类共同的认知能力如何被用来产生和理解语法表达意义不同的语言的理解。此外，这项研究的结果将与西南奥吉布语社区分享，以加强语言振兴的努力。所有的语言都可以指代有生命的（有生命的）和无生命的（无生命的）实体，并且有不同的方式来传达故事中不同角色的重要性。然而，Ojibwe的独特之处在于这些功能在语言的语法中起着核心作用。在奥吉布语中，名词根据指代的是有生命的实体还是无生命的实体而有不同的语法标记。此外，有生命的名词参与了一个独特的“聚光灯”系统。当一个故事、对话或话语中有多个有生命的名词时，其中一个被标记为近因名词（聚光灯下的人物），而所有其他的都被标记为明显名词（聚光灯外的人物）。Ojibwe与英语等语言的进一步不同之处在于，词序不作为理解句子意思的主要线索。相反，Ojibwe有一个复杂的系统，在这个系统中，动词的一致性形式和名词的动性/排除性信息被一起使用来理解句子的意思。这项拟议的研究将着眼于说Ojibwe语的人如何利用这些信息来源来理解谁在做一个特定的动作，谁正在经历一个动作。我们将采用两种方法。首先，一个语言生成任务，给说话者一个不完整的句子序言，并要求用它来形成一个完整的句子，将被用来确定说话者对歧义名词的语法作用做出了什么假设。第二项是语言理解任务，参与者将一边听奥吉布韦语的句子，一边看一组与句子的不同解释相对应的图片。参与者的眼球运动将被记录下来，以了解句子的解释是如何随着输入的变化而展开和变化的。这项提议的研究是Ojibwe的第一个同类研究，对语言认知表征感兴趣的语言学家和对振兴感兴趣的社区成员将会感兴趣。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This project investigates how speakers of Southwestern Ojibwe use the language's unique grammatical features to understand complex sentences. Southwestern Ojibwe is a revitalizing indigenous language spoken by approximately 5,000 first and second language speakers in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Southern Ontario. Its grammar has been researched for decades, but little is known about how speakers produce and understand Ojibwe sentences during normal language comprehension and production. This is the focus of current project. Specifically, this research addresses the question of whether listeners use Ojibwe-specific grammatical cues to make predictions about how the meaning of the sentence will resolve, focusing on what types of information Ojibwe speakers use to identify the grammatical subject of a sentence. This project joins a small but growing body of research that looks at endangered and understudied languages using experimental fieldwork, and expands our understanding of how the cognitive capabilities common to all humans are used to produce and comprehend languages that differ in how their grammar expresses meaning. Furthermore, the results of this research will be shared with the Southwestern Ojibwe-speaking community to bolster language revitalization efforts.All languages can refer to both living (animate) and non-living (inanimate) entities, and have different ways of conveying the importance of different characters in a story. However, Ojibwe is unique in that these functions play a central role in the grammar of the language. In Ojibwe, nouns get different grammatical markers according to whether they refer to animate or inanimate entities. Furthermore, animate nouns participate in a unique "spotlighting" system. When there are multiple animate nouns in a story, conversation, or discourse, one of them is designated proximate (the character in the spotlight), while all others are marked obviative (the characters outside of the spotlight). Ojibwe further differs from languages like English in that word order does not serve as the primary cue for understanding the meaning of a sentence. Instead, Ojibwe has a complex system where the form of agreement on the verb and the animacy/obviation information on nouns are used together to understand the meaning of a sentence. The proposed study will look at how Ojibwe speakers use these sources of information to understand who is doing a particular action, and who is undergoing an action. Two methods will be employed. First, a language production task, where speakers are given an incomplete sentence preamble and are asked to use it to form a complete sentence, will be used to determine what assumptions speakers make about the grammatical role of ambiguous nouns. Second, a language comprehension task where participants will listen to sentences in Ojibwe while looking at an array of pictures corresponding to different interpretations of the sentence. Participants' eye movements will be recorded to understand how the interpretation of the sentence unfolds and changes over time in response to the input. The proposed study is the first of its kind on Ojibwe, and will be of interest to linguists interested in the cognitive representation of language, and to community members interested in revitalization.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.