Doctoral Dissertation Research: The expression of temporal-modal semantics in an endangered language

University Of Texas At Austin, Austin TX

Investigators

Abstract

Whenever we speak, we communicate complex temporal-modal information about the events and situations we are describing: Did this event occur in the past, or will it occur in the future? Is it a hypothetical event, a guaranteed event, or something that truly happened? The goal of this dissertation project is to enhance our understanding of how speakers express temporal-modal semantics, and how they manage this information within a discourse. The co-PI will create new language infrastructure for an endangered and underdocumented language; using this documentation, the co-PI will analyze the expression of temporal-modal semantics in the language. Thorough descriptions of temporal-modal systems in the world's languages help linguists analyze global variation and grammatical change, and this in turn can illuminate underlying cognitive structures. Furthermore, the language infrastructure created by this project can serve as the basis for future research in other areas of linguistics. This project incorporates research training for both US undergraduate students and indigenous language speakers. Following established methods for language documentation and semantic fieldwork, the co-PI will record naturalistic speech in the target language, including conversation, narratives, and procedural discourse. The recordings will be transcribed, translated, and analyzed in consultation with native speakers. This corpus of naturalistic speech will be supplemented by elicited speech, structured experiments, and previously-existing documentation from social media. Data from related languages will allow for a comparative perspective on the temporal-modal system. The dissertation will contribute to the typological study of temporal-modal semantics: the language has primarily aspectual TAM categories, and so this research furthers our understanding of how tense and modality are communicated in an aspect-based system. 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.