Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Interaction of Transitivity Alternations and Verbal Affix Stacking in a Morphologically Complex Language

博士论文研究：形态复杂语言中及物性交替与动词词缀堆叠的相互作用

• 批准号: 1918028
• 负责人: Patience Epps
• 金额: $ 1.89万
• 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: 2019
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2019-07-01 至 2022-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1918028&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Interaction; Transitivity

All languages have ways to indicate who did what to whom, and grammatically different strategies offer different perspectives on an event. For example, if Pat is reaching for a cookie, for example, we might expect Pat's mother to say "Pat broke the jar". However, Pat might prefer to say "The jar broke", or even "My sister made me break the jar". In other words, Pat might choose a grammatical strategy that obscures the breaker and the broken object (the two participants in the event) for a reason like avoiding punishment. Such changes in the expression of participants are known as valence alternations. While probably all languages have strategies to manipulate valence, they vary in how they do this: which participants can be added or subtracted, in what conditions, and with what linguistic resources. To achieve the deepest understanding of how this works, linguists must investigate languages which vary significantly from English, including languages which use a greater number of suffixes and prefixes on verbs. This project will contribute to these questions through an exploration of valence alternations in an as yet understudied indigenous South American language, Mocoví, which unlike English displays highly complex verbal morphology. Broader impacts will include the training of community members and undergraduate students in linguistic documentation and description, the creation of community pedagogical resources, and the training of a dissertation student. The corpus will be accessible to scholars and the general public via the Archive of Indigenous Languages of Latin America. More broadly, this work contributes to the scholarship on Argentina's indigenous cultural heritage. By supporting indigenous language maintenance through activities such as the preparation of illustrated booklets for Mocoví primary schools, this project will also continue the strong binational ties between Argentina and the U.S. in the areas of educational and scientific collaboration. In particular, this research will benefit from the close cooperation between the Universidad Nacional del Nordeste (Argentina) and The University of Texas at Austin (U.S.).This project provides an in-depth investigation of valence alternations in the central-northern variety of Mocoví [moc], an underexplored Guaycuruan language spoken in northeastern Argentina. Linguists still have much to understand regarding how the manipulation of participants interacts with other aspects of a language's grammar, and how these resources develop over time. Where in English, speakers tend to add words like "make" to increase valence, languages with complex verbal morphology, like Mocoví, often leverage different resources, such as combinations of verbal affixes. Mocoví's valence-adjusting mechanisms involve the stacking of verbal suffixes according to strategies that are very different from those seen in well-studied European languages. Fieldwork will be carried out by a local team formed by two Mocoví community members and the co-PI, a doctoral student at The University of Texas at Austin, and will create a robust corpus of naturalistic speech across discourse types, together with elicited data focusing on transitivity alternations. The integrated exploration of both types of data allows assessment of possible differences in transitivity-related phenomena across genre, style, etc., among other questions. The corpus will also provide an important data set for further work on Mocoví, including the exploration of dialectal differences and their social and linguistic motivations within this region of intense language contact.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.

所有语言都有办法表明谁对谁做了什么，并且语法上不同的策略提供了对事件的不同视角。例如，如果帕特伸手去拿饼干，我们可能会期望帕特的母亲说“帕特打破了罐子”。然而，帕特可能更喜欢说“罐子破了”，甚至是“我姐姐让我打破了罐子”。换句话说，帕特可能出于避免惩罚等原因而选择一种语法策略来掩盖破坏者和被破坏的物体（事件的两个参与者）。 参与者表达的这种变化被称为价态交替。虽然可能所有语言都有操纵效价的策略，但它们的操作方式有所不同：可以添加或减少哪些参与者、在什么条件下以及使用什么语言资源。为了最深入地理解其工作原理，语言学家必须研究与英语显着不同的语言，包括在动词上使用大量后缀和前缀的语言。该项目将通过探索尚未得到充分研究的南美本土语言 Mocov 中的价态交替来解决这些问题，与英语不同，Mocov 表现出高度复杂的言语形态。更广泛的影响将包括对社区成员和本科生进行语言记录和描述方面的培训、创建社区教学资源以及对论文学生进行培训。学者和公众将通过拉丁美洲土著语言档案馆访问该语料库。更广泛地说，这项工作有助于阿根廷土著文化遗产的学术研究。通过为莫科夫准备插图小册子等活动来支持土著语言的维护小学，该项目还将延续阿根廷和美国在教育和科学合作领域的牢固两国关系。特别是，这项研究将受益于北北部国立大学（阿根廷）和德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校（美国）之间的密切合作。该项目对 Mocov& 中北部品种的价态交替进行了深入研究。 #237; [moc]，一种在阿根廷东北部使用的尚未开发的瓜伊库鲁语言。关于参与者的操纵如何与语言语法的其他方面相互作用，以及这些资源如何随着时间的推移而发展，语言学家仍然有很多需要了解的地方。在英语中，说话者倾向于添加“make”等单词来增加效价，而具有复杂动词形态的语言（例如 Mocov）经常利用不同的资源，例如动词词缀的组合。莫科夫的效价调整机制涉及根据与经过深入研究的欧洲语言中看到的策略非常不同的策略堆叠动词后缀。实地工作将由两名莫科夫组成的当地团队进行。社区成员和共同 PI（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校的博士生）将创建一个强大的跨话语类型的自然主义语音语料库，以及专注于及物性交替的引出数据。对两种类型数据的综合探索可以评估跨类型、风格等与及物性相关的现象可能存在的差异以及其他问题。该语料库还将为 Mocov 的进一步研究提供重要的数据集，包括探索方言差异及其在这个语言接触频繁的区域内的社会和语言动机。该奖项反映了 NSF 的法定使命，并被认为是值得的通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估来提供支持。

项目成果

Relaciones flexibles en mocoví (guaycurú): morfología y léxico

Relaciones flexions en mocovà (guaycurào): morfologà y léxico

• DOI: 10.56683/rs222135
• 发表时间: 2022
• 期刊: RASAL Lingüística
• 作者: Juárez, Cristian