Doctoral Dissertation Research: Documentation, Description and Analysis of the Grammar of a Minority Language

Every human population communicates and expresses itself through language, but languages are diverse in form and structure. Categories available in one language may not be available in others. Adding to this complexity, the same categories can be expressed through similar structures or very different ones.

To understand this diversity, linguistic data must be captured and compiled in a structured manner, through documentation. As a field of inquiry, language documentation augments the empirical foundations of linguistic research and related disciplines which rely on linguistic data. This doctoral dissertation project contributes to linguistic infrastructure by documenting, describing, and analyzing the grammar of an endangered minority language that to date, has no documentation of its structures and categories, yet exhibits displays interesting typological features that are of interest to linguistics broadly.

In addition to the training of a doctoral student, the project trains native speakers in the techniques and processes of language documentation.

National and transnational languages are spoken by millions of speakers, yet most of the world's languages are spoken by minority populations. As the world becomes more interconnected, majority languages increasingly dominate minority ones, leading to their disappearance. Language extinction makes it impossible to collect data on that language, which is a loss in knowledge and perspectives on the world.

This project adds to linguistic corpus by documenting the grammatical features of an endangered minority language with several typologically unusual properties, for example, the lack of both absolute and relative tense. The doctoral student will document language information using audio- and video-recording of different linguistic genres including conversations and mythical narratives, and prioritizing naturalistic data.

Using annotations of these recorded texts the doctoral student will then describe and analyze the language and document its grammar. This effort builds linguistic infrastructure and advances linguistic knowledge by enabling other scientists to hypothesize about the range of linguistic structures. The data collected from this project will be available at The Archive of Indigenous Languages of Latin America (AILLA).

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.