Typological research on the morphosyntax of the Native languages of the Northwest Coast of North America

在这个研究项目中，几乎所有的参与者都能够在三年的时间里在加拿大进行实地考察。我们能够在自己和国外的语言学家之间讨论研究的各个方面。在这个项目中研究的所有语言（Sliammon，Nootka，Haida和Coast Tshimshian）都是由少数老年人使用的，因此有消失的危险。因此，通过这个项目收集的语言数据作为这些语言的记录是非常宝贵的。然而，这项研究的目标不仅是记录这些语言，而且是对它们的变体句法特征进行跨语言比较。北美西北海岸的语言形成了一个“语言区”，分享了许多语言现象，其中许多是不常见的，对普通语言学有很大的兴趣。通过这个项目，我们认识到，在类型学问题中，“多合成”的概念是一个相当有问题的概念，而且出乎意料地复杂。根据形态类型学，本项目研究的所有语言都被归类为多合成语言。“多合成”通常被定义为一种语言，其中一个词可以由许多语素构成，因此一个词可以包含许多概念，这些概念在其他类型的语言中可以用许多单独的词来表达。然而，尽管这些语言显然属于多合成类型，但它们高度合成的表现形式却大不相同。通过这个项目，我们能够澄清这些语言的某些特征，关于是什么使它们成为多合成的，我们也开始理解多合成概念的复杂问题。

In this research project, almost all the participants were able to conduct fieldwork in Canada during the three year period. We were able to discuss various aspects of the research among ourselves and also with linguists abroad. All the languages studied in this project (Sliammon, Nootka, Haida, and Coast Tshimshian) are spoken by a limited number of elderly speakers, and are therefore in danger of disappearing. The linguistic data gathered through this project, therefore, is invaluable as a record of these languages.The goal of this research was, however, not only to document the languages in question, but to conduct a cross-linguistic comparison of their morph syntactic traits. The languages of the Northwest Coast of North America form a 'language area' that shares a number of language phenomena, many of which are uncommon and of great interest to general linguistics. Such phenomena include 'polysynthesis' and the problem of classifying word-classes.Through this project, we came to realize that, among the typological questions, the notion of polysynthesis is quite problematic and unexpectedly complex. All the languages studied in this project are classified as polysynthetic, according to the morphological typology. 'Polysynthetic' is usually defined as a language in which a word may be formed with many morphemes, and thus one word may contain many concepts forming what would be expressed in a sentence with many separate words in other types of languages. However, although the languages in question clearly belong to the polysynthetic type, their manifestation of the high degree of synthesis is quite different from one another. Through this project, we were able to clarify certain characteristics of these languages as regards what make them polysynthetic, and also we began to understand this complex question of the notion of polysynthesis.