9322751 Stross This project supports the dissertation research of a linguistic anthropologist from the University of Texas, studying the rhetorical functions of parallel speech styles among native speakers of the Sierra Popoluca language of rural Veracruz, Mexico. Parallelism (defined as repetition with systematic variation of grammatical, semantic or prosodic structures of an utterance) in Native American verbal performance has been shown to enhance meaning in traditional narratives. This research will look at relationships in a variety of speech genres from conversation to ritual speech to provide a comparative data base of parallelism in discourse performance. The student will record, transcribe and translate naturally occurring speech events in a variety of contexts. This research is important because it will add to our understanding of the role of parallelism in American Indian languages, will help train a junior linguistic scientist, and will document and conserve native American linguistic culture. ***
