Postdoctoral Fellowship: SPRF: Social Dynamics and Hierarchy in Grammar and Language Use: Documenting Honorifics

Tsutsui, Martha Satoko, Seattle WA

Investigators

Abstract

This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) and Linguistics programs. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research. NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields. Under the sponsorship of Prof. Eric W. Campbell at University of California, Santa Barbara, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career researcher investigating language change and honorific systems. Honorifics are culturally specific terms that encode rich social information about hierarchical relations between a speaker and an addressee or the way in which a speaker creatively wishes to express or influence such a relation. They are uncommon across the languages of the world, but due to their cultural importance and contextual embeddedness, they are a crucial part of understanding how human language can be shaped by specialized usage of their speakers. Studies about honorifics are still relatively few, but almost nothing is known about how honorific are used and change in processes of language shift. This project will provide a linguistic documentation and description of the rapidly shifting honorific system. The data from this project could also be used for future sociolinguistic studies regarding social structures and how these structures affect language use in communities. More widely, understanding language-specific strategies gives us a deeper understanding of underlying principles of social interaction across languages and cultures. This project is fieldwork and community-based, collecting spontaneous interactional data from speakers in context to undertake a pragmatic documentation in the community. This project will draw upon notions of linguistic repertoire and indexicality among others from sociolinguistics, pragmatics, and discourse analysis. This study will contribute to theoretical notions of linguistic honorification and explore how stylistic linguistic shrinkage, results in language loss in public domains and contexts where speakers would have historically used honorifics. This project contributes to the broader documentation of endangered languages that are considered “fragmentary,” according to UNESCO. This project will have several broader impacts, the most notable of which will be the community’s engagement and empowerment in the documentation of their language, which can be transformational for the revitalization of the language. As a part of this project, younger community members will continue to be trained in language documentation methods, enabling intergenerational cooperation and knowledge sharing. Data will also be archived, which will ensure the long-lasting preservation of the data for future academic and community purposes. 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.