The goal of this dissertation project is to produce a thorough and accessible reference grammar of Laguna Keresan. Laguna is one of seven members of the Keresan language family, which is an isolate, not known to be related to any other language family. Despite this special status, Keresan remains one of the least well-documented families in North America, with no published dictionaries or analyzed text collections, and no full-scale grammatical description since Miller (1965).
This project will produce a reference grammar, in two versions, which will address this gap in the literature. The first version is primarily intended for linguists, and will provide coverage of the phonology, morphology, syntax and discourse structures of Laguna Keresan, as well the current sociolinguistic setting of the language in the Laguna community. It will take into account recent work in typology and grammaticization, and will place the grammatical phenomena of Laguna in a cross-linguistic context. This first version will be written in the framework of what has recently come to be called Basic Linguistic Theory, similar to the work of other researchers such as Dixon on Fijian and Foley on Yimas. The goal is to provide information on the language in a way which is accessible to researchers working in a wide variety of different theoretical frameworks.
The second version of the reference grammar will be written specifically for the speakers, teachers and learners of Laguna Keresan. It will do away with much of the technical jargon and cross-linguistic perspective of the first version, and instead focus on describing the strictures of the language for the lay audience, using terminology and points of reference which are understandable and meaningful to them. By producing these two versions, the results of the research are made available both to the academic community, as well as to the members of the Laguna tribe, who have afforded the researchers the privilege of working on their language.
