Doctoral Dissertation Research: Investigating Temporal Morphology and Verbal Order in an Endangered Language

University Of Minnesota-Twin Cities, Minneapolis MN

Investigators

Abstract

This doctoral dissertation project involves original research with native speakers of an endangered language to document and analyze a complex aspect of the grammar. This work makes the knowledge of first speakers of the language accessible to the community, language learners, and linguists. The project is an in-depth linguistic examination of how and when to use specific grammatical patterns depending on the situation and the speaker’s intent, which serves to further linguistic understanding of how human language functions and to document and support an endangered Indigenous language. Speakers of a language can convey a proposition on its own, such as in the sentence, "It is snowing," but often such ideas are embedded in other contexts, such as in "I think it is snowing," or "when it is snowing, I wear a jacket." In each of these English examples, "it is snowing" looks the same, but in many other languages including the language of interest in this project, speakers use different grammatical structures to express the proposition in each context. These different grammatical structures are called "clause types," and fluent speakers use them to convey a wide range of nuanced meanings. This project elucidates how these configurations are used by native speakers. This informs a theoretical linguistic understanding of clause typing generally while also supporting the needs of the community by documenting valuable linguistic data and teaching learners how the language functions. In the absence of everyday immersion environments where learners would have the rich and varied contexts necessary to acquire the nuances required for mastery of the language, linguistic analysis provides generalizations of native speaker grammar patterns for learners to emulate. This award is made as part of a funding partnership between the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities for the NSF Dynamic Language Infrastructure – NEH Documenting Endangered Languages Program. 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.