Comparative Database of the Derivational Morphology of a Language Family

University Of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison WI

Investigators

Abstract

The historical development of a language family can be difficult to ascertain because the materials about that language family are widely dispersed. This project creates new computational infrastructure (an accessible, searchable, family-wide corpus database) that integrates dispersed material that can serve as research infrastructure for a language family and for comparative analysis of other language families. This new infrastructure will contribute to a more accurate and reliable reconstruction of the language family, leading to improved understanding of subgrouping within the family. The infrastructure database will also be useful for future research and documentation (e.g. the writing of grammars and other reference works) on languages of this family. This new database will enable theoretical work on the synchronic structure of words, advancing approaches to reconstructing polysynthetic languages, and can lead to new lines of inquiry. Tagging the corpus with semantic features, geocodes, and other such information will be invaluable for analytical work in the future, for example, lexical semantics, morphology, dialectology, and typology, and will have an impact on understanding these areas more broadly. This project makes important contributions in building infrastructure for comparison of languages within a language family when the languages are morphologically complex. The infrastructure itself will be of general value for other linguists who are engaged in work on language families with complex morphology. It will also make major contributions to the understanding of understudied areas such as lexical semantics, and it will allow for a deeper understanding of complex and little understood areas in the historical developments of the language family. It will further serve needs of many communities where there is a focus on creating new vocabulary in the languages of the family. 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.