Investigations in the Semantics of Kiowa, a Native American language of Oklahoma

University Of Kansas Center For Research Inc, Lawrence KS

Investigators

Abstract

The most important use of language is communication between people, where the transmission of information is essential. This transmission relies on speakers and listeners knowing what the words and parts of words mean, and how those parts combine to make meaningful sentences that fit in a conversation. That knowledge is called the semantics of a language. Researchers explore semantics to probe the nature of knowledge, culture, and cognition within individual cultures and throughout the human species as a whole. Understanding the subtle meaning of linguistic elements is also important for language learning. This study will document the semantics of the Kiowa language, a severely endangered language spoken by members of the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma. Many Native American tribes, including the Kiowa have established programs to preserve and revitalize tribal languages through teaching and language-nest programs. The Native American Languages Act, passed by the U.S. Congress in 1990, enacted into policy the recognition of the unique status and importance of Native American languages. Broader impacts of this project include support for Kiowa revitalization, as some documentation will have dual use as teaching materials. Also, this project will bring together teachers of Kiowa and will include Native graduate researchers, broadening participation in linguistic science both by community members and academics. Led by a linguist who is also a tribal member, this project will conduct an in-depth investigation into Kiowa semantics. Semantics forms a crucial component of language, but linguists have not thoroughly documented any language's semantics with depth and precision, because the theoretical framework to do so was only recently developed. This project will apply this framework of language documentation, in order to uncover the semantics of phenomena crucial to the Kiowa language. The investigators will elicit language judgments from native speakers of the language, which can tease apart subtle aspects of meaning that are often impossible for speakers to define with words. The project will also record and examine new texts that document naturalistic language use, especially in cultural domains under-represented by currently available Kiowa texts. Kiowa grammar includes multiple areas of interest to formal semantics, such as evidentiality, modality, incorporation, quantification, and degree, all of which are also important areas for learners to acquire. This project will result in a reference grammar and teaching materials that will greatly aid these programs by covering the areas in semantics that remain poorly understood by teachers and researchers. This reference grammar will also serve as a manual for researchers of other Native American languages, especially those who are not trained in this research framework. This study will offer new insight for researchers on dozens of phenomena that occur in many languages besides Kiowa. In doing so, it will re-emphasize the longstanding contribution of Native American languages to linguistics, a scientific understanding of what is possible in human language, and thus a deeper understanding of what is possible in the human mind.