Comparative Database of the Derivational Morphology of a Language Family

一个语族的历史发展很难确定，因为有关该语族的资料非常分散。这个项目创建了新的计算基础设施（一个可访问的、可搜索的、全语料库数据库），它集成了分散的材料，可以作为一个语族的研究基础设施，也可以作为其他语族的比较分析。这种新的基础结构将有助于更加准确和可靠地重建语族，从而提高对语族内的次分组的理解。基础数据库也将有助于未来对这类语言的研究和文档（例如编写语法和其他参考著作）。这个新的数据库将使词语共时结构的理论工作成为可能，推进重建多合成语言的方法，并可能导致新的研究方向。用语义特征、地理编码和其他此类信息标记语料库，对于未来的分析工作（例如词汇语义、形态学、方言学和类型学）将是非常宝贵的，并将对更广泛地理解这些领域产生影响。当语族中的语言在形态上比较复杂时，该项目在构建基础结构方面做出了重要贡献。基础结构本身对其他从事复杂词法语系研究的语言学家具有普遍价值。它还将对理解词汇语义等研究不足的领域做出重大贡献，并将允许对语言家族历史发展中复杂和知之甚少的领域有更深入的理解。它将进一步满足许多社区的需要，这些社区的重点是用家庭语言创造新的词汇。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。

The historical development of a language family can be difficult to ascertain because the materials about that language family are widely dispersed. This project creates new computational infrastructure (an accessible, searchable, family-wide corpus database) that integrates dispersed material that can serve as research infrastructure for a language family and for comparative analysis of other language families. This new infrastructure will contribute to a more accurate and reliable reconstruction of the language family, leading to improved understanding of subgrouping within the family. The infrastructure database will also be useful for future research and documentation (e.g. the writing of grammars and other reference works) on languages of this family. This new database will enable theoretical work on the synchronic structure of words, advancing approaches to reconstructing polysynthetic languages, and can lead to new lines of inquiry. Tagging the corpus with semantic features, geocodes, and other such information will be invaluable for analytical work in the future, for example, lexical semantics, morphology, dialectology, and typology, and will have an impact on understanding these areas more broadly. This project makes important contributions in building infrastructure for comparison of languages within a language family when the languages are morphologically complex. The infrastructure itself will be of general value for other linguists who are engaged in work on language families with complex morphology. It will also make major contributions to the understanding of understudied areas such as lexical semantics, and it will allow for a deeper understanding of complex and little understood areas in the historical developments of the language family. It will further serve needs of many communities where there is a focus on creating new vocabulary in the languages of the family.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.