Linguistic and Anthropological Documentation and Analysis of an Endangered Language

少数人口使用的语言受到全球化和持续的社会经济变化的威胁，但它们包含未记录的语言基础设施和文化信息。这个项目记录了这样一种濒危语言，从而为语言学理论中的重要问题，如语调、元音系统和元音和谐以及言语策略提供了新的见解。这种语言分析还将提供对区域种群历史的更深层次的了解，并将促进对当地植物和植物用途的了解。结果将通过参考语法、多语言词典、民族历史专著、植物和植物用途民族植物学数据库以及存档和注释的语言数据来记录和传播。社会影响包括对当地社区成员进行语言记录培训，通过学者之间的积极合作促进国际科学合作，以及对本科生进行语言记录和分析方法培训。利用一种罕见且代表性不足的语言的数据，本项目将产生理论分析，影响高级舌根(ATR)和声(存在彼此发音必须相似的不寻常情况)、非连接声调形态和语法声调、对象性和报告语音等领域的语言类型学和理论。通过语言分析，这项研究将产生使用这种语言的社会、文化和历史的更广泛的背景。收集的数据将阐明该区域目前的民族语言情况和语言分类中尚未解决的问题，以及不断增加的比较民族植物学数据库的新语言数据的丰富。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力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 ongoing socioeconomic changes, yet they contain undocumented linguistic infrastructure and cultural information. This project documents such an endangered language, thereby providing new insights into important questions in linguistic theory such as tone, vowel systems and vowel harmony, and speech strategies. This linguistic analysis will also provide a deeper understanding of regional population history and will advance the understanding of local plants and plant uses. The results will be documented and disseminated via a reference grammar, a multi-lingual lexicon, an ethno-historical monograph, an ethnobotanical database of plants and plant uses, as well as by archived, annotated language data. Societal impacts include training of local community members in language documentation, fostering international scientific cooperation through active collaboration among scholars, and training undergraduate students in methods of language documentation and analysis. With data from a rare and underrepresented language, this project will produce theoretical analysis that will influence linguistic typology and theory in the domains of Advanced Tongue Root (ATR) harmony (there is an unusual case of sounds having to be similar to each other), non-concatenative tonal morphology and grammatical tone, logophoricity, and reported speech. Through its linguistic analysis the research will produce a broader context of the society, culture, and history in which this language is used. The collected data will illuminate both the present-day ethno-linguistic landscape of the region and unsolved issues in language classification, and the enrichment with new language data of a growing comparative ethnobotanical database. The result will be of use to a variety of sciences and organizations.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.