Doctoral Dissertation Research: Investigating Temporal Morphology and Verbal Order in an Endangered Language

这个博士论文项目涉及与濒危语言的母语者的原始研究，以记录和分析语法的一个复杂方面。这项工作使社区、语言学习者和语言学家能够了解第一语言使用者的知识。该项目是一个深入的语言学研究，研究如何以及何时根据情况和说话者的意图使用特定的语法模式，这有助于进一步了解人类语言的功能，并记录和支持濒危的土著语言。一种语言的说话者可以自己传达一个命题，例如在句子中，“下雪了，但这些想法通常会出现在其他语境中，比如“我想下雪了”或“下雪的时候，我穿夹克”。在这些英语例子中，“it is snowing”看起来都是一样的，但在许多其他语言中，包括本项目感兴趣的语言，说话者在每个上下文中使用不同的语法结构来表达命题。这些不同的语法结构被称为“小句类型”，流利的使用者用它们来传达各种各样的细微差别的含义。这个项目阐明了这些配置是如何使用的母语。这通常会告知对子句类型的理论语言学理解，同时也通过记录有价值的语言数据和教授学习者语言功能来支持社区的需求。在缺乏日常沉浸环境的情况下，学习者将有必要获得掌握语言所需的细微差别，语言分析提供了母语语法模式的概括，供学习者模仿。该奖项是国家科学基金会和国家人文基金会为NSF动态语言基础设施- NEH记录濒危语言计划建立的资助伙伴关系的一部分。该奖项反映了NSF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 doctoral dissertation project involves original research with native speakers of an endangered language to document and analyze a complex aspect of the grammar. This work makes the knowledge of first speakers of the language accessible to the community, language learners, and linguists. The project is an in-depth linguistic examination of how and when to use specific grammatical patterns depending on the situation and the speaker’s intent, which serves to further linguistic understanding of how human language functions and to document and support an endangered Indigenous language.Speakers of a language can convey a proposition on its own, such as in the sentence, "It is snowing," but often such ideas are embedded in other contexts, such as in "I think it is snowing," or "when it is snowing, I wear a jacket." In each of these English examples, "it is snowing" looks the same, but in many other languages including the language of interest in this project, speakers use different grammatical structures to express the proposition in each context. These different grammatical structures are called "clause types," and fluent speakers use them to convey a wide range of nuanced meanings. This project elucidates how these configurations are used by native speakers. This informs a theoretical linguistic understanding of clause typing generally while also supporting the needs of the community by documenting valuable linguistic data and teaching learners how the language functions. In the absence of everyday immersion environments where learners would have the rich and varied contexts necessary to acquire the nuances required for mastery of the language, linguistic analysis provides generalizations of native speaker grammar patterns for learners to emulate. This award is made as part of a funding partnership between the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities for the NSF Dynamic Language Infrastructure – NEH Documenting Endangered Languages Program.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.