Doctoral Dissertation Research: Using Naso Verbal Art to discover general phonological and grammatical principles

University Of Texas At Austin, Austin TX

Investigators

Abstract

This grant supports documentation and research on Naso (also known as Teribe), an endangered Chibchan language spoken in the mountainous region of Panama that borders Costa Rica. There are approximately 500 speakers of Naso, but only a few elders are fluent users of a special form of Naso called tlokwo rönge 'profound words'. In tlokwo rönge, pairs of rhyming words are the basis of couplets that convey metaphors relating to local, traditional indigenous life. The grammatical and sound structure of this poetic register has not been documented before. Other Chibchan languages spoken nearby (Bribri, Cabécar, and Kuna) are known to have similarly structured poetic language. Methods used in this project will include elicitation of phonological and grammatical properties of the 'profound words', and interviews recording speakers' intuitions about the meaning, performative context, and knowledge surrounding the origins and areal diffusion of the words. The latter point makes the study relevant to the study of difrasismos, or poetic couplets, found across Mesoamerican languages. The broader questions addressed in this project are: What are the motivations for using parallelism in verbal art across languages of the world? What do these structures tell us about the human mind? While definite answers are not assumed to result from this project, the case study of Naso verbal art aims to advance the scientific literature by building on theoretic models within phonology and poetics. This project responds to a need to document aesthetic and rhetorical properties of natural discourse, as motivated by the apparent loss of these structures in situations of language shift.