Enriching knowledge of linguistic typology and language classification through linguistic and cultural documentation and analysis of an unknown language complex.

少数人使用的语言受到全球化和社会经济变化的威胁，但它们包含没有记录的语言和文化知识，导致对语言使用和语言结构的更深入了解。该项目侧重于尚未得到系统关注的密切相关语言的语言学和人类学分析。这项研究将推进对这些未被描述的语言的语言学特性的科学认识，并为似乎非常不寻常的音调系统和词序特性提供新的见解。该项目将进一步阐明在这个语言复合体中有多少种语言以及它们之间的关系，这些关系基于语言标准，例如相互可理解性和结构可理解性，以及与邻近语言的接触动态。这项研究将产生一个理论上知情的语法以及字典，文本和视频，重点是实践活动，植物群和动物群词汇和相关的民族生物学信息，并回忆现在当地灭绝的巨型动物，代表科学知识，这是消失的社会变化正在迅速发生。这个项目的语言组成部分将导致一个理论上知情的语料库-对这些相关语言的分析。产品将包括各种类型的音频/视频记录，从收集的语料库中提取的参考语法以及启发式和字典。在类型学理论中，特别是在语气和语序领域，将为重要问题提供信息的理论分析。收集的数据将阐明该地区当今的民族语言景观，并解决语言分类中未解决的问题。该奖项反映了NSF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。

Languages spoken by small populations are threatened by globalization and socioeconomic change, yet they contain undocumented linguistic and cultural knowledge that leads to a deeper understanding of language use and language structure. This project focuses on linguistic and anthropological analysis of closely related languages that have not yet received systematic attention. The research will advance scientific knowledge of linguistic properties of these under-described languages, and provide new insight into what appear to be highly unusual tone systems and word order properties. The project will further shed light on the understanding of how many languages there are in this language complex and their relationships to each other based on linguistic criteria such as mutual intelligibility and structural intelligibility, and of contact dynamics with neighboring languages. The research will produce a theoretically informed grammar as well as a dictionary, texts, and videos with a focus on practical activities, flora and fauna vocabulary and related ethnobiological information, and reminiscences about now locally extinct megafauna, representing scientific knowledge that that is disappearing with the societal changes that are rapidly occurring.The linguistic component of this project will lead to a theoretically informed corpus-based analysis of these related languages. Products will include audio/video recordings of various genres, reference grammars drawing from the collected corpora as well as elicitation, and dictionaries. The theoretical analyses that will inform important questions in typological theory, in particular in the domains of tone and word order. The collected data will illuminate both the present-day ethno-linguistic landscape of the region and address unsolved issues in language classification. The products of this project will be of value to linguists as well as other sciences.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.