CAREER: Documenting temporal contrasts in an endangered language via community linguistics

George Mason University, Fairfax VA

Investigators

Abstract

This project documents an endangered language with fewer than 1000 speakers. The language is in a period of rapid shift, with fewer and fewer people in younger generations speaking it. This project involves two interconnected parts: documenting key structures having to do with time in the language, and training native speakers, graduate students, and undergraduate students in the fundamentals of linguistics and community-centered language documentation. The sentence structure and meaning of tense and related notions in this language, which lacks required tense marking on verbs, are under-documented and poorly understood by linguists. This is a significant gap in our knowledge since tense plays a critical role in theories of language. The training provided by this project will enable two community members to engage in and later lead the documentation of their language and future reclamation activities. The instruction and explanations will be shaped by the community linguists’ own insights, and the training will serve as the basis for a curriculum that can then be used for training other members of the community. Graduate and undergraduate students will also be trained in these methods; this prepares the next generation of academic linguists to be a part of a discipline that acts in a more responsible and collaborative fashion with respect to communities of speakers. The documentation created during the project will be made available and accessible to learners, speakers, and researchers. The first objective of the project is to thoroughly document the morphosyntax and semantics of tense- and aspect-like contrasts in the language via fieldwork with native speakers and to analyze these contrasts within a generative framework. Documentation will take the form of elicitation with culturally-specific storyboards, recording of narratives and conversations, and targeted elicitation. Topics for conversation prompts will be determined in collaboration with the community revitalization group, so that documentation of traditional knowledge can be accomplished simultaneously. The second objective of the project is the reciprocal training of two community linguists along with research team members. The research team will provide training in linguistics and language documentation, and community linguists will provide input on their ways of knowing. This training will enable the community linguists to begin to lead language documentation efforts in the community, including training other community members. The training of community linguists through hands-on documentation experience, in a reciprocal knowledge-building approach, advances knowledge about this kind of capacity-building program. The culturally-specific storyboards for documentation will constitute a new resource for those working with related languages and will be easily transformed into pedagogical materials. The documentation will also add to the corpus of data from the language, which will be of great interest to linguists and computational linguists working on languages with similar structures. 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.