Postdoctoral Fellowship: SPRF: Documenting Dialect Divergences Across Space and Time

Blum, Mirella L, Arlington MA

Investigators

Abstract

This award was provided as part of the NSF 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 considered to be 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 Dr. Laura McPherson at Dartmouth College, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist investigating the diversity of linguistic tone and patterns in tonal evolution. The goal of the project is to apply these questions to a typologically unusual language. Few languages exist that possess all of the elements of the the target language sound system, and in even fewer do the elements function independently. Where other languages might use affixation to express lexical or grammatical distinctions, the target language's way of doing this is almost entirely suprasegmental (not having to do with the segmental sounds of consonants and vowels). A phonation contrast (whether the voice sounds creakier or breathier) and tone contrasts (the pitch melody of a given word) function independently in this language but are linked in almost every other language. The target language also exhibits features previously theorized to be impossible. For example, there are three degrees of vowel length (short, long, and overlong), and contrastive tonal alignment (a word’s meaning can be changed by the time point at which a vowel’s phonetic fall in pitch begins). This project focuses on undocumented dialects of the target language; the goal of the project is to describe their tone systems and investigate grammatical phenomena in which tone is involved. The project will also ultimately lead to comparative studies: investigations into how these dialects are similar and dissimilar to one another, and how they might have evolved from a common ancestor. Careful documentation of many dialects of a typologically unique language will contribute to understanding of the possible range of tonal phenomena in human language and deepen knowledge of highly complex tone systems. Most previous research on tone in the target language has focused on single dialects of the language, but the tone systems can differ considerably across dialects. This project will document the range of tonal behavior and phenomena by analyzing the tone systems of several undocumented or under-described dialects from multiple dialect clusters, forming hypotheses about how the tone systems evolved and diverged from one another, and collecting data that can be used for in-depth studies of tone in each dialect and for cross-dialect comparison. Primary research methods include the collection of controlled datasets and analysis of recorded spontaneous speech. The project also promotes accessible remote methodologies for conducting linguistic fieldwork. 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.