Doctoral Dissertation Research: Blafe Documentation and Description

Harvard University, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

This grant supports the fieldwork and research for a project to document Nama, an endangered language spoken in Western Province, Papua New Guinea, one of the most linguistically diverse countries in the world where language documentation is critically needed. Spoken by around 1,200 people, Nama belongs to the Morehead-Upper Maro family, which is a poorly understood and undocumented minority Papuan language group. Nama is interesting because it exhibits a set of morphosyntactic properties which are unattested in the Trans-New Guinea (TNG) family, the largest and heretofore most extensively documented Papuan family. Furthermore, Nama uses an extremely rare senary numeral system with the base 6, which is assumed to have cultural underpinnings. The documentation of Nama will be an important step toward providing a more fine-grained characterization of Papuan languages and developing a more comprehensive account of linguistic variation in the New Guinea region. It will also establish significant ties between outside researchers and the Nama community and will validate the importance of Nama among the local population. This project will produce an extensive and multifaceted description of Nama: a comprehensive reference grammar detailing syntactic, morphological, and phonological properties of Nama; a Nama-English lexical database which will lay the foundation for the future compilation of a bilingual dictionary; a publicly accessible online corpus of annotated audio recordings of native speakers (containing, for example, short stories, conversations, narratives, elicited utterances); an archive of textual and paradigmatic materials; and, research papers analyzing morphosyntactic properties of theoretical significance. This project will also contribute to the scientific training of a promising scholar.