Grammar and multilingual practices through the lens of everyday interaction in two endangered languages in the East Tukano family

University Of Colorado At Boulder, Boulder CO

Investigators

Abstract

Little is known about how and why speakers alternate among multiple languages in highly multilingual contexts. This project will advance scientific understanding of multilingualism by documenting everyday interactions among multilingual speakers in one such regional system. The project will produce a richly annotated audiovisual record of language use in everyday conversation as used in an extremely complex linguistic environment. Results will increase scientific understanding of bilingualism and multilingualism, advancing the national interest in multiple fields, including linguistics, psychology, neuroscience and education. Broader impacts of the project are extensive. There are international fieldwork opportunities for a full-time post-doctoral researcher and two graduate students and language documentation training for a team of indigenous researchers. Language maintenance materials will be collaboratively produced for two endangered language communities. The project will advance the discipline by its development and dissemination of language documentation methods for documenting conversational interactions. Fostering a new international collaboration between U.S. and Brazilian academic institutions will also be a result. This project will be the first of its kind to focus on multilingualism and everyday interaction in the Vaupés region of northwestern Amazonia. The research team will collect extensive amounts of primary video data among multilingual speakers of two endangered East Tukano languages, Kotiria (Wanano) and Wa'ikhana (Piratapuyo). Data will be collected across three regional subsites, combining spontaneous recording of naturally-occurring conversations, planned sessions with two or more speakers conducting interactive tasks, and semi-structured sociolinguistic interviews. A team of indigenous researchers will be trained to collect, process, and annotate video-recorded conversations using the innovative oral annotation method, both participating in analysis and helping to expedite processing of the primary data. The resulting multilingual audiovisual corpus will reveal to what extent and for which purposes speakers of Kotiria and Wa'ikhana employ elements of multiple languages in everyday conversation. The team's analysis of these data will contribute to the development of a more robust theoretical framework for understanding and documenting multilingual practices in small-scale systems and endangered language contexts. The documentary record will also facilitate more fine-grained investigation of aspects of grammar that may be shaped by face-to-face interaction, such as the use of evidentials (obligatory markers expressing the speaker's source of knowledge about an event), thus adding to theoretical accounts of their meaning and functions. Integrating methods from conversation analysis (sequential analysis of conversation), linguistic anthropology (ethnographic description), language documentation (corpus creation), and typologically-informed grammatical description, the researchers will provide expanded and enriched analyses of grammatical structure and create a pioneering profile of conversational interaction in the multilingual northwest Amazon.