CAREER: Documentation, description, and analysis of multiword tone and harmony systems in four languages

这个CAREER项目调查了四种未被充分研究的语言的语言系统。项目的每一年，PI都会培训一个由本科生和研究生组成的团队，学习语言文档方法，并且该团队会前往使用每种目标语言的社区进行工作。该团队记录每种语言的自然语音，并引出特定的单词和句子，以记录语法的各个方面。这些记录的材料被保存在加州语言档案中，保存了语言数据，以便语言学家、其他学者和语言社区可以使用。这项工作填补了经验上的空白，记录了未被充分研究的语言的语法，这是为目标语言开发语言资源以及语言学理论和类型学的重要的第一步。它对我们理解语言的运作方式也有重要的意义。该项目加强了学术界之间现有的国际关系，并建立了与农村社区的关系，促进了文化交流和理解。它还为本地和国际学生提供培训，为下一代语言研究人员的发展和多样化做出贡献。本项目研究的四种语言都显示出跨词边界的语素特定语音过程。在一种语言中，未完成体的标志是语气的变化，这种变化不仅影响句子的主语，也影响动词。语素特定的跨词音系并没有很好的跨语言记录，因此本研究开始填补类型学知识的空白。此外，大多数形态学和音系相互作用的正式理论预测，语素特定的音系应该局限于词或子词域。从这四种语言的和声和音调数据来看，这是一个不正确的预测。更深入地了解跨词词素特定音系的边界，以及它们是否与形态句法或韵律边界一致，有助于讨论需要什么样的形式机制来解释跨语言的形态学和音系之间的相互作用。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 CAREER project investigates the linguistic system of four understudied languages. Each year of the project, the PI trains a team of undergraduate and graduate students in language documentation methods, and the team travels to work with communities of each of the target languages. The team records natural speech in each language and elicits specific words and sentences in order to document aspects of the grammar. The recorded materials are archived in the California Language Archive, preserving language data into the future so that they are available to linguists, other academics, and speaker communities. This work fills an empirical gap, documenting the grammar of understudied languages, which is an important first step for developing language resources for the target languages, as well as for linguistic theory and typology. It also has important implications for our understanding of how languages work. The project strengthens existing international relationships between academics and builds relationships with rural communities, fostering cultural exchange and understanding. It also provides training to both local and international students, contributing to the development and diversification of the next generation of language researchers.The four languages studied in this project all display morpheme-specific phonological processes that cross word boundaries. In one language, the imperfective aspect is marked by a shift in tone that affects the verb as well as the subject of the sentence. Morpheme-specific cross-word phonology is not well documented across languages, so this study begins to fill a gap in typological knowledge. Additionally, most formal theories of the interaction between morphology and phonology predict that morpheme-specific phonology should be limited to word or sub-word domains. The data from harmony and tone in these four languages shows this is an incorrect prediction. A deeper understanding of the boundaries of cross-word morpheme-specific phonology, and whether they align with morphosyntactic or prosodic boundaries, informs debates on what formal mechanisms are needed to account for interactions between morphology and phonology across languages.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.