Doctoral Dissertation Research: Documenting information structure in Isthmus Zapotec

University Of Chicago, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

Isthmus Zapotec (ZAI) is a Zapotecan language of the Otomanguean stock spoken by approximately 80,000 people in and around Juchitán de Zaragoza, in southern Oaxaca, Mexico. Although the percentage of residents of Juchitán older than 50 who speak ZAI is quite high (more than 80%), the percentage of children who are growing up speaking the language is much lower, hovering around 50%. Thus, while stable Spanish-ZAI bilingualism has been the norm for several centuries, the language shift from ZAI to Spanish is now occurring very quickly (as is common in the majority of indigenous communities throughout Mexico). Given that the long-term viability of the language is uncertain, it is important to document spontaneous language use in a variety of natural contexts. The main objective of this project is to document information structure in the language by recording, transcribing, annotating, and analyzing spoken texts from spontaneous life narratives. In addition, native speaker judgments of constructed examples will be elicited. Information structure is understood as the study of the ways that the different components of sentences -- intonation, morphology, and syntax -- are organized by speakers in order to communicate certain kinds of information. Although the available linguistic documentation on ZAI is greater than that of most other Mexican indigenous languages, particularly those outside of the Mayan language family, no documentation of information structure or discourse phenomena exists for this language. The documentary corpus to be obtained will thus allow for a more complete understanding of the range of constructions that are available to IZ speakers and how they are employed to respond to specific discourse motivations. These materials promise to bring novel data to Mesoamerican linguistics and will provide new grounds from which to evaluate and inform theoretical work on information structure and narrative. Proper linguistic documentation and, in particular, the documentation of discourse can be an important tool in forging effective language maintenance efforts in the ZAI community. The recordings and transcriptions will be made available to the community, thereby contributing to ZAI language teaching and learning. The documentation of ZAI oral genres could have an especially positive effect, since local schools lack materials derived from their own oral traditions and/or from naturally-occurring speech.