Postdoctoral Fellowship: SPRF: Social Dynamics and Hierarchy in Grammar and Language Use: Documenting Honorifics

该奖项是美国国家科学基金会社会、行为和经济科学博士后研究奖学金（SPRF）和语言学项目的一部分。SPRF计划的目标是为学术界、工业界或私营部门和政府的科学事业准备有前途的早期职业博士级科学家。SPRF奖励包括在知名科学家的赞助下进行为期两年的培训，并鼓励博士后进行独立研究。美国国家科学基金会寻求促进科学界各阶层的科学家，包括那些未被充分代表的群体的科学家，参与其研究项目和活动；博士后阶段是实现这一目标的重要专业发展阶段。每个博士后必须解决各自学科领域的重要科学问题。在加州大学圣巴巴拉分校埃里克·w·坎贝尔教授的赞助下，该博士后奖学金支持研究语言变化和荣誉系统的早期研究人员。敬语是特定于文化的术语，它编码了丰富的社会信息，这些信息涉及说话人与被说话人之间的等级关系，或者说话人创造性地希望表达或影响这种关系的方式。它们在世界上的语言中并不常见，但由于它们的文化重要性和语境嵌入性，它们是理解人类语言如何被说话者的特殊用法所塑造的关键部分。关于敬语的研究还相对较少，但对于敬语在语言转换过程中是如何使用和变化的研究几乎一无所知。这个项目将提供一个语言文档和描述快速变化的敬语系统。这个项目的数据也可以用于未来关于社会结构以及这些结构如何影响社区语言使用的社会语言学研究。更广泛地说，理解语言特定策略可以让我们更深入地了解跨语言和文化的社会互动的基本原则。这个项目是基于社区的实地调查，从说话人那里收集自发的互动数据，在社区中进行实用的文献记录。本项目将借鉴社会语言学、语用学和语篇分析等方面的语言库和指数性概念。本研究将有助于语言敬语化的理论概念，并探讨语体萎缩如何导致公共领域和历史上说话者使用敬语的语境中的语言丧失。据联合国教科文组织称，该项目有助于更广泛地记录被认为是“残缺”的濒危语言。该项目将产生几个更广泛的影响，其中最显著的影响将是社区参与和授权他们的语言文档，这可能对语言的复兴具有变革性。作为该项目的一部分，年轻的社区成员将继续接受语言记录方法方面的培训，从而实现代际合作和知识共享。数据也将被存档，这将确保数据的长期保存，以供将来的学术和社区使用。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 award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) and Linguistics programs. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research. NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields. Under the sponsorship of Prof. Eric W. Campbell at University of California, Santa Barbara, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career researcher investigating language change and honorific systems. Honorifics are culturally specific terms that encode rich social information about hierarchical relations between a speaker and an addressee or the way in which a speaker creatively wishes to express or influence such a relation. They are uncommon across the languages of the world, but due to their cultural importance and contextual embeddedness, they are a crucial part of understanding how human language can be shaped by specialized usage of their speakers. Studies about honorifics are still relatively few, but almost nothing is known about how honorific are used and change in processes of language shift. This project will provide a linguistic documentation and description of the rapidly shifting honorific system. The data from this project could also be used for future sociolinguistic studies regarding social structures and how these structures affect language use in communities. More widely, understanding language-specific strategies gives us a deeper understanding of underlying principles of social interaction across languages and cultures.This project is fieldwork and community-based, collecting spontaneous interactional data from speakers in context to undertake a pragmatic documentation in the community. This project will draw upon notions of linguistic repertoire and indexicality among others from sociolinguistics, pragmatics, and discourse analysis. This study will contribute to theoretical notions of linguistic honorification and explore how stylistic linguistic shrinkage, results in language loss in public domains and contexts where speakers would have historically used honorifics. This project contributes to the broader documentation of endangered languages that are considered “fragmentary,” according to UNESCO. This project will have several broader impacts, the most notable of which will be the community’s engagement and empowerment in the documentation of their language, which can be transformational for the revitalization of the language. As a part of this project, younger community members will continue to be trained in language documentation methods, enabling intergenerational cooperation and knowledge sharing. Data will also be archived, which will ensure the long-lasting preservation of the data for future academic and community purposes.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.