Computational Tool and Corpora Development in a Language with Complex Clause-marking

Chapman University, Orange CA

Investigators

Abstract

One way ambiguity exists in language is through pronouns. Complex sentences can introduce ambiguity when it is unclear whether pronouns have the same referent or a different one. For example, in a sentence like, "She yelled when she threw the ball," both instances of "she" could refer to the same referent (i.e., "Mary"), or they could refer to different females (i.e., "Mary" and "Susan"). To better understand this and other phenomena associated with complex clauses, it is necessary to investigate sources of crosslinguistic variation in the grammatical strategies of constructions. In some languages, a set of markers signal the relationship between two clauses in a system known as switch-reference. These indicate the temporal/logical relationship between the events conveyed by the clauses and whether these events share a prominent participant or not. Switch reference systems are the main discourse organization device in several indigenous languages of the Americas, Australia, New Guinea, and the South Pacific. Arguably the most complex switch-reference system in the world is found in Amawaka, a critically endangered language from Peruvian Amazonia from the Panoan family. Investigators will document Amawaka to advance knowledge of the complexities of switch-reference, the historical paths that give rise to these systems, and their communicative advantages and potential ambiguities. It will advance knowledge in regards grammar structures beyond the sentence level and discourse organization strategies. The data will be permanently stored in archives for endangered languages, available to researchers and the general public. Additionally, undergraduate students and members of the indigenous community will receive linguistic training and field research experience and will produce a storybook and bilingual dictionary for use in schools. These activities will educate and train the next generation of researchers and foster respectful collaboration with the community. The team will record primary data in the field through and then turn to transcribing, translating, and annotating and analyzing that data using existing linguistic software and by developing a a treebank tool for syntactic analysis. Because treebanks contain linguistically annotated data sets, they serve as critical tests of linguistic theories in syntax for sentence structure, given the robustness of the number of naturally occurring examples. Alongside switch-reference, other complex systems of theoretical and typological importance are found in Amawaka, including tripartite case-marking that interacts with information structure, a large number of singular vs. plural suppletive verbs, and sophisticated prosody (tone and glottalization). Considering that the language is rapidly becoming extinct, the present research will ensure a timely account of these and other features, which have been scantly studied or not studied at all. Project outputs include a large annotated Amawaka database, a grammar description, dictionaries, focused research papers, and pedagogical materials. In addition to increasing the scientific knowledge of Amawaka, switch reference, and its other grammatical features, the resulting treebank data set will contribute to more robust and reproducible language sciences. A Panoan-internal comparison will allow the reconstruction of central aspects of the protolanguage. Ultimately, the scientific findings will significantly contribute to Amazonian linguistics and highly impact the linguistic field more generally. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.