Understanding Evidentiality and other grammatical phenomena through the expanded Documentation of Hupa

University Of California-Davis, Davis CA

Investigators

Abstract

Hupa, a critically endangered Native American language of northwestern California, has a rich system of grammatical markers called evidentials that speakers deploy to indicate sources of information and viewpoint in narratives. Details of the distinctive Hupa system are still largely unexplored but have tremendous potential to improve our general understanding of how such meanings are expressed in human languages. In this three-year Documenting Endangered Languages project, Justin Spence of the University of California, Davis and Ramon Excamilla of the University of Central Arkansas will work with Hupa elder Verdena Parker to obtain narrative interpretations of archival film footage and translations of yet unanalyzed recordings. In conjunction with targeted elicitations, analysis of the resulting Hupa language samples will help develop typologically and theoretically situated descriptions of evidentiality and other aspects of Hupa discourse structure. Public access to material produced by the project will be achieved through improvements to an existing online dictionary and text database. Expanding the quantity of accessible transcribed texts and the coverage of the dictionary, together with improvements to the user interface, will allow users to perform more sophisticated queries and to have greater confidence in the accuracy of the results they obtain. All recordings and transcriptions produced by the project will be archived with the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages at UC Berkeley, ensuring that they will remain accessible to future generations of users for many years to come.