Doctoral Dissertation Research: Using Naso Verbal Art to discover general phonological and grammatical principles

博士论文研究：利用 Naso Verbal Art 发现一般语音和语法原则

• 批准号: 1465235
• 负责人: Anthony Woodbury
• 金额: $ 1.51万
• 依托单位: University of Texas at Austin
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2015
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2015-07-01 至 2018-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1465235&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Using; Naso

This grant supports documentation and research on Naso (also known as Teribe), an endangered Chibchan language spoken in the mountainous region of Panama that borders Costa Rica. There are approximately 500 speakers of Naso, but only a few elders are fluent users of a special form of Naso called tlokwo rönge 'profound words'. In tlokwo rönge, pairs of rhyming words are the basis of couplets that convey metaphors relating to local, traditional indigenous life. The grammatical and sound structure of this poetic register has not been documented before. Other Chibchan languages spoken nearby (Bribri, Cabécar, and Kuna) are known to have similarly structured poetic language.Methods used in this project will include elicitation of phonological and grammatical properties of the 'profound words', and interviews recording speakers' intuitions about the meaning, performative context, and knowledge surrounding the origins and areal diffusion of the words. The latter point makes the study relevant to the study of difrasismos, or poetic couplets, found across Mesoamerican languages.The broader questions addressed in this project are: What are the motivations for using parallelism in verbal art across languages of the world? What do these structures tell us about the human mind? While definite answers are not assumed to result from this project, the case study of Naso verbal art aims to advance the scientific literature by building on theoretic models within phonology and poetics. This project responds to a need to document aesthetic and rhetorical properties of natural discourse, as motivated by the apparent loss of these structures in situations of language shift.

该赠款支持哥斯达黎加的NASO（也称为Teribe）的文档和研究。传达与当地的传统土著生活有关的隐喻。语言中使用的方法将包括“深刻的词”的语音和晶状体特性，含义，表演性的背景和知识的起源和面向世界的扩散。 。该项目中提出的更广泛的问题是：Usarlol Aross语言的动机是什么？语言转移。