Doctoral Dissertation Research: The expression of temporal-modal semantics in an endangered language

博士论文研究：濒危语言中时态模态语义的表达

• 批准号: 2019441
• 负责人: Anthony Woodbury
• 金额: $ 0.67万
• 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: 2020
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2020-08-01 至 2024-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2019441&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; expression; temporal

Whenever we speak, we communicate complex temporal-modal information about the events and situations we are describing: Did this event occur in the past, or will it occur in the future? Is it a hypothetical event, a guaranteed event, or something that truly happened? The goal of this dissertation project is to enhance our understanding of how speakers express temporal-modal semantics, and how they manage this information within a discourse. The co-PI will create new language infrastructure for an endangered and underdocumented language; using this documentation, the co-PI will analyze the expression of temporal-modal semantics in the language. Thorough descriptions of temporal-modal systems in the world's languages help linguists analyze global variation and grammatical change, and this in turn can illuminate underlying cognitive structures. Furthermore, the language infrastructure created by this project can serve as the basis for future research in other areas of linguistics. This project incorporates research training for both US undergraduate students and indigenous language speakers.Following established methods for language documentation and semantic fieldwork, the co-PI will record naturalistic speech in the target language, including conversation, narratives, and procedural discourse. The recordings will be transcribed, translated, and analyzed in consultation with native speakers. This corpus of naturalistic speech will be supplemented by elicited speech, structured experiments, and previously-existing documentation from social media. Data from related languages will allow for a comparative perspective on the temporal-modal system. The dissertation will contribute to the typological study of temporal-modal semantics: the language has primarily aspectual TAM categories, and so this research furthers our understanding of how tense and modality are communicated in an aspect-based system.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.

每当我们说话时，我们都会传达有关我们所描述的事件和情况的复杂时间模态信息：这个事件是在过去发生的，还是会在未来发生？这是一个假设的事件、一个确定的事件，还是真实发生的事情？本论文项目的目标是增强我们对说话者如何表达时间模态语义以及他们如何在话语中管理这些信息的理解。联合 PI 将为濒临灭绝且记录不足的语言创建新的语言基础设施；使用此文档，联合 PI 将分析语言中时态模态语义的表达。对世界语言中时态模态系统的全面描述有助于语言学家分析全球变异和语法变化，这反过来又可以阐明潜在的认知结构。此外，该项目创建的语言基础设施可以作为未来语言学其他领域研究的基础。该项目包括针对美国本科生和土著语言使用者的研究培训。按照既定的语言记录和语义实地考察方法，联合首席研究员将以目标语言记录自然语音，包括对话、叙述和程序性话语。这些录音将与母语人士协商进行转录、翻译和分析。这个自然主义语音语料库将得到引出语音、结构化实验和来自社交媒体的先前存在的文档的补充。来自相关语言的数据将允许对时间模态系统进行比较。该论文将有助于时间模态语义的类型学研究：该语言主要具有方面 TAM 类别，因此这项研究进一步加深了我们对时态和情态如何在基于方面的系统中进行交流的理解。该奖项反映了 NSF 的法定使命和通过使用基金会的智力优点和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，该项目被认为值得支持。