ABSTRACT The goal of the project is to prepare a clear, functionally based reference grammar of Barbareno Chumash, a language indigenous to California. Barbareno Chumash is probably among the best documented but least known languages of North America. The enormous quantity of manuscript material that exists, most of it unorganized and much of it untranslated, has until now daunted scholars working alone. A group will organize the material and enter it into a computer in a form that can be sorted by a concordance program. It will then be possible to extract all instances of any morpheme in the corpus, in context, with literal and free translations. Each participant will research specific areas of the language and present results to the rest of the group for discussion and revision. During the final year of the project, the studies will be worked into a comprehensive grammar. Because of the elaborate verb morphology of the language, which has major ramifications for syntactic and discourse structure, a detailed, richly exemplified grammar should be of special importance to linguistic theory. Because of the much debated assignment of Chumash to the hypothesized Hokan stock of languages, accessibility of this data will be an important tool for work on deeper genetic relationships among North America languages. The grammar should also provide a long-awaited resource to ethnologists, ethnobiologists, ethnohistorians, historians, and others interested in the Chumash.
