CAREER: Documenting temporal contrasts in an endangered language via community linguistics

该项目记录了一种使用人数不到1000人的濒危语言。这种语言正处于快速转变时期，年轻一代中说这种语言的人越来越少。该项目包括两个相互关联的部分：记录语言中与时间有关的关键结构，培训母语人士、研究生和本科生学习语言学基础知识和以社区为中心的语言文献。由于缺乏对动词进行时态标注的要求，这种语言的时态和相关概念的句子结构和意义缺乏文献记载，语言学家对此也知之甚少。由于时态在语言理论中起着至关重要的作用，这是我们知识上的一个重大空白。这个项目提供的培训将使两名社区成员能够参与并在以后领导他们的语言和今后的开垦活动的文件编制工作。指导和解释将由社区语言学家自己的见解形成，培训将作为课程的基础，然后可用于培训社区的其他成员。研究生和本科生也将接受这些方法的培训；这为下一代学术语言学家做好了准备，使他们成为一门学科的一部分，以一种更加负责任和协作的方式对待演讲者群体。在项目期间创建的文档将提供给学习者，演讲者和研究人员。该项目的第一个目标是通过与母语人士的实地考察，彻底记录语言中时态和方面对比的形态语法和语义，并在生成框架内分析这些对比。文档将采用具有特定文化的故事板的启发形式，记录叙述和对话，以及有针对性的启发。对话提示的主题将与社区振兴小组合作确定，以便同时完成传统知识的记录。该项目的第二个目标是对两名社区语言学家和研究小组成员进行相互培训。研究小组将提供语言学和语言文献方面的培训，社区语言学家将提供他们的认识方式。这项培训将使社区语言学家能够开始领导社区的语言文档工作，包括培训其他社区成员。通过实践文档经验，以互惠的知识建设方式培训社区语言学家，促进了对这类能力建设项目的了解。特定文化的故事板将成为使用相关语言的工作人员的新资源，并将很容易转化为教学材料。该文档还将增加该语言的数据语料库，这将对研究具有类似结构的语言的语言学家和计算语言学家非常感兴趣。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。

This project documents an endangered language with fewer than 1000 speakers. The language is in a period of rapid shift, with fewer and fewer people in younger generations speaking it. This project involves two interconnected parts: documenting key structures having to do with time in the language, and training native speakers, graduate students, and undergraduate students in the fundamentals of linguistics and community-centered language documentation. The sentence structure and meaning of tense and related notions in this language, which lacks required tense marking on verbs, are under-documented and poorly understood by linguists. This is a significant gap in our knowledge since tense plays a critical role in theories of language. The training provided by this project will enable two community members to engage in and later lead the documentation of their language and future reclamation activities. The instruction and explanations will be shaped by the community linguists’ own insights, and the training will serve as the basis for a curriculum that can then be used for training other members of the community. Graduate and undergraduate students will also be trained in these methods; this prepares the next generation of academic linguists to be a part of a discipline that acts in a more responsible and collaborative fashion with respect to communities of speakers. The documentation created during the project will be made available and accessible to learners, speakers, and researchers.The first objective of the project is to thoroughly document the morphosyntax and semantics of tense- and aspect-like contrasts in the language via fieldwork with native speakers and to analyze these contrasts within a generative framework. Documentation will take the form of elicitation with culturally-specific storyboards, recording of narratives and conversations, and targeted elicitation. Topics for conversation prompts will be determined in collaboration with the community revitalization group, so that documentation of traditional knowledge can be accomplished simultaneously. The second objective of the project is the reciprocal training of two community linguists along with research team members. The research team will provide training in linguistics and language documentation, and community linguists will provide input on their ways of knowing. This training will enable the community linguists to begin to lead language documentation efforts in the community, including training other community members. The training of community linguists through hands-on documentation experience, in a reciprocal knowledge-building approach, advances knowledge about this kind of capacity-building program. The culturally-specific storyboards for documentation will constitute a new resource for those working with related languages and will be easily transformed into pedagogical materials. The documentation will also add to the corpus of data from the language, which will be of great interest to linguists and computational linguists working on languages with similar structures.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.