Understanding spatial determiners, complex predicates, and case marking through traditional narratives in endangered languages

University Of Chicago, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

The primary goal of the Documenting Endangered Languages program is to create thorough accessible audio-visual documentation and description of languages dangerously close to extinction. It aims to capture, before the information is permanently lost, the linguistic features of each language, opening a window into the capabilities of the human mind, as well as the language's unique cultural, geographic, and social setting. The current project contributes to this goal by thoroughly documenting two neighboring related languages, Matngele and MalakMalak, spoken in remote northern Australia. Lenore Grenoble and Dorothea Hoffman, experienced language documenters from the University of Chicago, will create an annotated database which will include indigenous historical and personal narratives, natural conversation, and data from targeted elicitation. They will create a rich corpus useful in investigating a range of grammatical features, especially spatial determiners, complex predicate ordering, and morphological marking of grammatical agents and patients. Historical narratives from the indigenous languages of Australia are deeply rooted in landscape and environmental features. In these narratives, landscape features are inherent elements of the grammar and are expressed in substantial uses of deictic and spatial determiners, coverbs, and suffixes. The very structure of the narratives is determined by spatial ordering and the use of motion descriptions at episode boundaries. MalakMalak and Matngele narratives and other spontaneous speech samples are also excellent sources of data for optional ergative/absolutive case-marking syntactic structure that is governed by prosody, information structure, and discourse environment. Similarly, one finds information on complex predicates whose ordering is not fixed but also potentially determined by information structure. There are also a small number of optional noun classifiers whose usage is subject to discourse constraints. Finally, the two tribes of MalakMalak and Matngele have been in close cultural and linguistic contact for a long time. Unique storytelling techniques and bilingualism in this setting offer exceptional insight into language and literary contact in a highly diverse multilingual and multicultural setting. By involving, speakers, local schools, and adults no longer actively speaking the languages, the proposed project may be able to encourage revitalization processes of both languages. Documentary materials from this project will be accessible from the Endangered Languages Archive at the University of London and at the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures.