Doctoral Dissertation Research: Documentation, Description and Analysis of the Grammar of a Minority Language

每个民族都通过语言进行交流和表达，但语言的形式和结构是多种多样的。在一种语言中可用的类别可能在其他语言中不可用。增加这种复杂性的是，相同的类别可以通过相似或非常不同的结构来表达。为了理解这种多样性，必须通过文档以结构化的方式捕获和编译语言数据。作为一个研究领域，语言文献增加了依赖语言数据的语言学研究和相关学科的经验基础。这个博士论文项目通过记录、描述和分析一种濒临灭绝的少数民族语言的语法，为语言学基础设施做出了贡献，迄今为止，这种语言没有结构和类别的记录，但展示了语言学广泛感兴趣的有趣的类型化特征。除了培养博士生外，该项目还培训母语人士语言文档的技术和流程。数以百万计的人使用民族语言和跨国语言，但世界上大多数语言都是由少数民族使用的。随着世界变得更加相互联系，多数语言越来越多地支配少数语言，导致它们消失。语言的灭绝使人们无法收集有关该语言的数据，这是对世界的知识和视角的损失。该项目通过记录濒临灭绝的少数民族语言的语法特征来增加语言语料库，这些语言具有几种不同寻常的类型学特征，例如，缺乏绝对时态和相对时态。博士生将使用不同语言类型（包括对话和神话叙事）的音频和视频记录语言信息，并优先考虑自然数据。使用这些记录文本的注释，博士生将描述和分析语言，并记录其语法。这一努力建立了语言基础设施，并通过使其他科学家能够对语言结构的范围进行假设来推进语言知识。从该项目收集的数据将在拉丁美洲土著语言档案（AILLA）中提供。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。

Every human population communicates and expresses itself through language, but languages are diverse in form and structure. Categories available in one language may not be available in others. Adding to this complexity, the same categories can be expressed through similar structures or very different ones. To understand this diversity, linguistic data must be captured and compiled in a structured manner, through documentation. As a field of inquiry, language documentation augments the empirical foundations of linguistic research and related disciplines which rely on linguistic data. This doctoral dissertation project contributes to linguistic infrastructure by documenting, describing, and analyzing the grammar of an endangered minority language that to date, has no documentation of its structures and categories, yet exhibits displays interesting typological features that are of interest to linguistics broadly. In addition to the training of a doctoral student, the project trains native speakers in the techniques and processes of language documentation.National and transnational languages are spoken by millions of speakers, yet most of the world's languages are spoken by minority populations. As the world becomes more interconnected, majority languages increasingly dominate minority ones, leading to their disappearance. Language extinction makes it impossible to collect data on that language, which is a loss in knowledge and perspectives on the world. This project adds to linguistic corpus by documenting the grammatical features of an endangered minority language with several typologically unusual properties, for example, the lack of both absolute and relative tense. The doctoral student will document language information using audio- and video-recording of different linguistic genres including conversations and mythical narratives, and prioritizing naturalistic data. Using annotations of these recorded texts the doctoral student will then describe and analyze the language and document its grammar. This effort builds linguistic infrastructure and advances linguistic knowledge by enabling other scientists to hypothesize about the range of linguistic structures. The data collected from this project will be available at The Archive of Indigenous Languages of Latin America (AILLA).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.