Doctoral Dissertation Research: Linguistic Analysis of Grammatical Constructions in Discourse about Civic and Economic Issues

University Of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst MA

Investigators

Abstract

The project will address the complex ways in which social, civic, economic, and linguistic factors interact to provoke or prevent the accelerated process of language shift of indigenous languages. Simultaneously, it will document a specialized genre. Growing evidence shows that more specialized genres and knowledge in languages are vulnerable to attrition. Through an analysis of particular linguistic elements, the project will provide greater detail about an endangered language that displays a highly complex morphological system. Because the topic is limited to a particular kind of specialized speech (the matters of state), the analysis will also expand knowledge about the role of sociolinguistic and other factors in the linguistic shift, including linguistic ideologies about who should speak a language, how and where it should be spoken. The focus will be on Nahuatl (ISO 639-3 NHE), a Uto-Aztecan language possessing a complex morphology of prefixes and suffixes that interacts with the discursive content of speech. This complex morphology (quite different than English morphology, for example) creates a testing bed for how specialized genres interact with specific aspects of a language, here extensive suffixing and prefixing processes, as well as how different speakers use the same grammatical elements in different ways. Project activities include the development of pedagogical materials, a workshop for elementary school teachers in the village, and the training of two native speakers in linguistic documentation methodologies. Broader impacts include the training of a doctoral student, a public repository of audio and video recordings and transcriptions archived at the University of Texas, Austin's AILLA repository, and the strengthening of collaborations between Mexican and American scholars. The project will expand knowledge about the linguistic and extra-linguistic factors that influence the maintenance or the shift of one language to another. The project will collect video and audio recordings of the oratory taking place in assemblies made up by women-only, men-only, and mixed groups from Nahua Mexican society to identify rhetorical strategies such as persuasion. This language is spoken in various parts of Mexico; this project will specifically document the variety located on the east-central side of the country. Usage will be analyzed for speaker variation as pertains to particular grammatical elements, as well as more "poetic" kinds of constructions such as metaphor, alliteration, parallelism, anaphora, and metonymy. Through the analyses of grammatical constructions in these civic- and economic-oriented genres, the CoPI will investigate how grammatical constructions and linguistic strategies used in governmental contexts are used by language users to accomplish social goals during the course of speeches on policy and civic topics. An analysis of the markers for linguistic categories like direction or future, frequently found in this specialized genre, will lead to a better understanding of their grammatical properties as well as how speakers of Nahuatl use these structures for different purposes. The researcher will use linguistic ethnography as the central methodology, supplemented by in-depth interviews. Ethnography is a methodology that includes linguistic investigation, participant observation, and recording of spontaneous speaking interactions. The results will provide insights not only for linguistics but also for sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and anthropology. 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.