Doctoral Dissertation Research: Analyzing the morphophonology and morphosemantics of an endangered language

University Of Hawaii, Honolulu

Investigators

Abstract

This doctoral dissertation project focuses on creating language infrastructure that documents an endangered and under-studied language. This documentation will enable the doctoral student to develop a wide-ranging grammatical description of the language, and to conduct analysis of the phonology and semantics of the language. Accessible, data-driven descriptions of the grammar of world languages allows linguists to make and evaluate theories and claims regarding the variation in form of human language, how languages change over time, and the historical relationships between different speech communities. The documentation of endangered languages which belong to small, isolated language families such as this language is a critical endeavor in linguistics as such languages contain many unique and undescribed grammatical features which can expand our understanding of the nature of human language. Language documentation also permits minority and indigenous communities to create long-lasting representations of community knowledge and life ways, and to build a language infrastructure on which to base language revitalization and maintenance work. This project works closely with local teachers and language workers, building academic and technical capacity which will aid in the maintenance and institutionalization of the language which until now has suffered marginalization in society. The doctoral student will conduct fieldwork with native speakers working to improve the quality of translation and annotation of existing texts and recordings of the language, as well as creating new video recordings with a wide range of participants. This improved and expanded documentary corpus will inform the student's dissertation, which consists of a reference grammar of the language in typological perspective, employing best practices in documentation-based language description. This language belongs to a language family which exhibits unique variations on a number of common traits of indigenous languages: highly synthetic and phonologically fusional verb morphology, extensive directional and associated motion systems, nominalization as the primary means of verbal subordination, and semantically complex means of indicating epistemic mood, evidentiality, and stance through grammaticalized systems. The doctoral student's dissertation will contribute to the regional typology of these languages, and will be sensitive to major topics of ongoing discussion in the regional linguistics literature, while also aiming to create a grammatical description that is of the broadest possible use and accessibility to language typologists and theorists. 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.