Doctoral Dissertation Research: Linguistic Analysis of Grammatical Constructions in Discourse about Civic and Economic Issues

该项目将探讨社会、公民、经济和语言因素相互作用的复杂方式，以促使或防止土著语言加速语言转换的进程。同时，它还将记录一种专门的流派。越来越多的证据表明，语言中更专业化的体裁和知识更容易受到自然减员的影响。通过对特定语言元素的分析，该项目将提供关于一种表现出高度复杂的形态系统的濒危语言的更多细节。由于该主题仅限于一种特定的专门演讲(国家问题)，分析还将扩大关于社会语言学和其他因素在语言转变中所起作用的知识，包括关于谁应该说一门语言、如何说以及在哪里说的语言意识形态。重点将放在Nahuatl(ISO 639-3 NHE)上，这是一种乌托-阿兹特克语言，具有复杂的前缀和后缀形态，与话语内容相互作用。这种复杂的词法(例如，与英语词法非常不同)为专业体裁如何与语言的特定方面相互作用创造了一个试验台，在这里，广泛的后缀和前缀过程，以及不同的说话者如何以不同的方式使用相同的语法元素。项目活动包括编写教学材料，为村里的小学教师举办讲习班，以及对两名母语为英语的人进行语言文献方法培训。更广泛的影响包括对博士生的培训，在德克萨斯大学存档的音频和视频记录和转录的公共储存库，奥斯汀的AILLA储存库，以及加强墨西哥和美国学者之间的合作。该项目将扩大关于影响一种语言保持或转换到另一种语言的语言和非语言因素的知识。该项目将收集演讲的视频和音频记录，以确定说服等修辞策略。集会由来自墨西哥纳瓦尔社会的仅限女性、仅限男性和混合群体组成。墨西哥各地都使用这种语言；这个项目将专门记录位于该国中东部的各种语言。本课程将分析与特定语法元素有关的说话人变体的用法，以及更具诗意的结构，如隐喻、头韵、平行、回指和转喻。通过对这些面向公民和经济的语体中的语法结构的分析，本文将调查在政府语境中使用的语法结构和语言策略是如何被语言使用者在政策和公民话题演讲过程中用来实现社会目标的。对这一特殊语类中经常出现的方向或将来等语言类别的标记进行分析，将有助于更好地理解它们的语法属性，以及Nahuatl的说话者如何将这些结构用于不同的目的。研究人员将使用语言民族志作为主要方法，并辅之以深入访谈。民族志是一种方法论，包括语言调查、参与者观察和自发言语互动的记录。这个奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，通过使用基金会的学术价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为是值得支持的。

The project will address the complex ways in which social, civic, economic, and linguistic factors interact to provoke or prevent the accelerated process of language shift of indigenous languages. Simultaneously, it will document a specialized genre. Growing evidence shows that more specialized genres and knowledge in languages are vulnerable to attrition. Through an analysis of particular linguistic elements, the project will provide greater detail about an endangered language that displays a highly complex morphological system. Because the topic is limited to a particular kind of specialized speech (the matters of state), the analysis will also expand knowledge about the role of sociolinguistic and other factors in the linguistic shift, including linguistic ideologies about who should speak a language, how and where it should be spoken. The focus will be on Nahuatl (ISO 639-3 NHE), a Uto-Aztecan language possessing a complex morphology of prefixes and suffixes that interacts with the discursive content of speech. This complex morphology (quite different than English morphology, for example) creates a testing bed for how specialized genres interact with specific aspects of a language, here extensive suffixing and prefixing processes, as well as how different speakers use the same grammatical elements in different ways. Project activities include the development of pedagogical materials, a workshop for elementary school teachers in the village, and the training of two native speakers in linguistic documentation methodologies. Broader impacts include the training of a doctoral student, a public repository of audio and video recordings and transcriptions archived at the University of Texas, Austin's AILLA repository, and the strengthening of collaborations between Mexican and American scholars. The project will expand knowledge about the linguistic and extra-linguistic factors that influence the maintenance or the shift of one language to another. The project will collect video and audio recordings of the oratory taking place in assemblies made up by women-only, men-only, and mixed groups from Nahua Mexican society to identify rhetorical strategies such as persuasion. This language is spoken in various parts of Mexico; this project will specifically document the variety located on the east-central side of the country. Usage will be analyzed for speaker variation as pertains to particular grammatical elements, as well as more "poetic" kinds of constructions such as metaphor, alliteration, parallelism, anaphora, and metonymy. Through the analyses of grammatical constructions in these civic- and economic-oriented genres, the CoPI will investigate how grammatical constructions and linguistic strategies used in governmental contexts are used by language users to accomplish social goals during the course of speeches on policy and civic topics. An analysis of the markers for linguistic categories like direction or future, frequently found in this specialized genre, will lead to a better understanding of their grammatical properties as well as how speakers of Nahuatl use these structures for different purposes. The researcher will use linguistic ethnography as the central methodology, supplemented by in-depth interviews. Ethnography is a methodology that includes linguistic investigation, participant observation, and recording of spontaneous speaking interactions. The results will provide insights not only for linguistics but also for sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and anthropology.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.