Planning for Funding Research on Endangered Languages

Suny At Stony Brook, Stony Brook NY

Investigators

Abstract

With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Alice Harris will coordinate a meeting to plan a variety of activities associated with the eventual development of a new initiative within NSF. The long-range goal of these activities is to dedicate funding to projects that document endangered languages. Such documentation is significant for (1) the relation between language variation and hypothesized limitations in cognitive capacity; (2) the ways that constituence and history of language families inform research on human pre-history; (3) how knowledge of the natural world is encoded in dying languages.