Doctoral Dissertation Research: Investigating complex word reanalysis through endangered language data

University Of Texas At Austin, Austin TX

Investigators

Abstract

The Documenting Endangered Languages Program seeks to discover unique linguistic phenomena that are in danger of being lost as communities cease to speak their traditional languages in favor of world varieties. Unusual typological features found in endangered languages contribute to an accurate understanding of the limits and possibilities of human language, thus documenting the languages where this data is evidenced is of prime importance. In the large majority of the world's languages it is impossible for prefixes or suffixes to be separated from their host words to form independent words. Working under the direction of Patience Epps at the University of Texas at Austin, Adam Tallman will conduct fieldwork on an endangered language to further investigate instances of this unique type of word reanalysis. Tallman will document Chacobo, an endangered Panoan language spoken by a few thousand people in the northern Bolivian Amazon. His findings will form the basis of his doctoral dissertation, a grammatical description of Chacobo with accompanying audio and video recordings. Chacobo is especially interesting for linguistic theory because of the unusual behavior of its morpho-syntactic processes such as the 'split-off' of tense and aspect morphemes and other functional morphology from an otherwise polysynthetic verb stem. Additionally, the Chacobo data will provide facts for comparative work in Amazonia and for theories about language change and the relationship between morphology and syntax. This is because Chacobo exhibits some grammatical features thought to occur in the Panoan parent language and not in linguistically related varieties. Therefore, Chacobo grammar will contribute to the investigation of the nature of earlier forms of the language and its development into modern varieties. Adam Tallman will also broaden participation in linguistic fieldwork by training community members in language documentation methodology. All products from this dissertation research will be archived and accessible at the Archive of Indigenous Languages of Latin America at the University of Texas at Austin.