Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Grammar of Space and Social Distance in Cushillococha Ticuna, an Endangered Language

University Of California-Berkeley, Berkeley CA

Investigators

Abstract

All languages have two categories of words: words that can be understood without context, like 'frog' and 'sand,' and words that can only be understood in context, like 'this,' 'that,' 'here,' and 'you.' There are many differences between these context-dependent words, known in linguistics as indexicals, and context-independent words. People use different cognitive processes to understand context-dependent words. Context-dependent words differ more between languages. Gestures, such as pointing, are also more important for understanding context-dependent language. Moreover, because many linguistic theories focus on context-independent aspects of language, the structure of context-dependent language is poorly understood. Against this background, this study examines context-dependent language in an endangered language that is an isolate, meaning it has no linguistic relatives. Using perspectives from linguistics, psychology, and anthropology, the researchers will study the meaning and use of this isolate's words equivalent to 'this,' 'that,' 'here,' 'there,' 'he,' and 'she.' This work will advance scientific understanding of context-dependent language and its relationship to gesture, a topic with applications in natural language processing, computer vision, and other areas of computational linguistics. The documentation will form the core material analyzed in a doctoral dissertation produced by the CoPI. Broader impacts include a publicly available deposit of the recordings and transcriptions, as well as collaborative efforts with community leaders to improve the literacy curriculum used in local indigenous schools, promoting educational equity and economic development in the region. The CoPI, a doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley, will analyze the documentation of Cushillococha Ticuna, an endangered indigenous language isolate spoken only in Peru. This project will specifically focus on the grammar of two types of context-dependent expressions in Ticuna: demonstratives -- words like this, that, and there -- and third-person pronouns. Ticuna's demonstratives have more complex meanings than those of other languages. While English 'this' and 'that' are usually believed to convey an object's location in space, the equivalent words in Ticuna convey both the location of the object and the tense of the entire sentence. Similarly, third person pronouns are richer in meaning in Ticuna than in English and other well-known languages. They encode both the gender of the referent, like English 'he' and 'she,' and the speaker's level of respect for the referent, as in the French pronouns 'tu' (you, informal) and 'vous' (you, formal). The researcher will study these two systems of context-dependent expressions using perspectives from three disciplines: logical semantics, neo-Gricean pragmatics, and Conversation Analysis. The interdisciplinary research methods will incorporate psycholinguistic experiments, interviews with native speakers, and recording of everyday conversations. In the demonstratives component of the project, the researcher will test recent attention-oriented theories of demonstratives by (a) applying them to typologically novel data and (b) probing their claims about the role of lexically specific heuristics in construal of demonstratives. In the honorifics component of the project, the research will examine everyday conversation and interview data to analyze both (a) the social meaning of honorifics and (b) their formal semantic properties.