Doctoral Dissertation Research: The expression of temporal-modal semantics in an endangered language

每当我们说话时，我们都在传递关于我们所描述的事件和情况的复杂的时间模态信息：这件事发生在过去吗，还是将来会发生？它是一个假设的事件，一个确定的事件，还是真实发生的事情？本论文项目的目标是增强我们对说话者如何表达时态语义的理解，以及他们如何在语篇中管理这些信息。共同语言倡议将为一种濒危和文献不足的语言创建新的语言基础设施；使用这个文档，合作者将分析语言中时间-模态语义的表达。对世界语言中时间-情态系统的全面描述有助于语言学家分析全球变化和语法变化，这反过来又可以阐明潜在的认知结构。此外，该项目创建的语言基础结构可以作为未来语言学其他领域研究的基础。该项目包括对美国本科生和土著语言使用者的研究培训。根据既定的语言记录和语义田野调查方法，联合pi将用目标语言记录自然语言，包括对话，叙述和程序话语。录音将被转录，翻译，并与母语人士协商分析。这个自然语言的语料库将由引出的语言、结构化的实验和来自社交媒体的先前存在的文档来补充。来自相关语言的数据将允许对时间-情态系统进行比较。本文将有助于时间模态语义学的类型学研究：语言主要有方面的TAM类别，因此本研究进一步加深了我们对时态和情态如何在基于方面的系统中交流的理解。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。

Whenever we speak, we communicate complex temporal-modal information about the events and situations we are describing: Did this event occur in the past, or will it occur in the future? Is it a hypothetical event, a guaranteed event, or something that truly happened? The goal of this dissertation project is to enhance our understanding of how speakers express temporal-modal semantics, and how they manage this information within a discourse. The co-PI will create new language infrastructure for an endangered and underdocumented language; using this documentation, the co-PI will analyze the expression of temporal-modal semantics in the language. Thorough descriptions of temporal-modal systems in the world's languages help linguists analyze global variation and grammatical change, and this in turn can illuminate underlying cognitive structures. Furthermore, the language infrastructure created by this project can serve as the basis for future research in other areas of linguistics. This project incorporates research training for both US undergraduate students and indigenous language speakers.Following established methods for language documentation and semantic fieldwork, the co-PI will record naturalistic speech in the target language, including conversation, narratives, and procedural discourse. The recordings will be transcribed, translated, and analyzed in consultation with native speakers. This corpus of naturalistic speech will be supplemented by elicited speech, structured experiments, and previously-existing documentation from social media. Data from related languages will allow for a comparative perspective on the temporal-modal system. The dissertation will contribute to the typological study of temporal-modal semantics: the language has primarily aspectual TAM categories, and so this research furthers our understanding of how tense and modality are communicated in an aspect-based system.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.