Sahaptian and the Evolution of Hierarchical Systems

University Of Oregon Eugene, Eugene OR

Investigators

Abstract

This research project, directed by Spike Gildea, is the US portion of a larger international collaboration that was conceived under the European Science Foundation's EUROCORES Programme, EuroBABEL. The full EuroBABEL project, entitled Referential Hierarchies in Morphosyntax: description, typology, diachrony, is a collaboration of researchers from 4 countries, including the US, the UK, Germany and Switzerland. This particular project focuses on the evolution of hierarchical grammatical systems in Sahaptian. In some languages, speakers use a different kind of sentence to say "I hit him" (Direct) as opposed to "He hit me" (Inverse), or "The man saw a cat" (Direct) versus "The cat scratched the man" (Inverse). In some languages, the verb agrees with first and second persons (me/you), but not with third persons (him/her/it). Looking at examples like these, a hierarchy in the minds of speakers steers choices about how to present descriptions of events: me = you > him/her/it > humans (a man) > animals (a cat) > inanimate things (a rock). In other languages, low-ranking subjects or high-ranking objects get special grammatical marking. Speakers of such languages communicate who does what to whom, but instead of using grammatical functions like "subject" and "object" as in English, they use the grammar of "higher" and "lower" participants in the hierarchy. Many of these languages are gravely endangered, with only a few (usually elderly) speakers remaining. In collaboration with their European partners, the researchers have three goals: (i) To verify whether all languages are sensitive to the same hierarchy, they are collecting two large databases to compare hierarchical grammar from languages all over the world. (ii) To explore why speakers choose one construction over another when participants are equal on the hierarchy ("He hit him"), they are annotating large collections of actual speech in four languages, coding for factors like animacy, number, and topicality. (iii) To help understand how hierarchical grammar gets started in the first place, they are reconstructing the sources of these grammatical systems in at least three language families and one linguistic isolate. In this project, the research team will annotate a Sahaptin database and will collaborate on reconstructions. The collaborative project seeks to better understand both the minds and the cultures of peoples who speak such languages.