Using modern and historical texts, newspapers, and recordings from this Turkic language of Chinese Turkestan, this project creates the first comprehensive and diachronic annotated corpus (1895-2011) of a major Central Asian language. Its aim is to understand the typological development of complex verb constructions. Light verbs (sometimes termed "auxiliaries"), which are unusually plentiful in modern Uyghur, express semantic nuances such as speaker intention, irony, and agency. Graduate and undergraduate students will be mentored in multimedia corpus creation and text annotation and analysis. Work with native Uyghur speakers, together with quantitative and qualitative corpus work, will evaluate the origin and development of these complex verb constructions. A comparison of these analyses of Turkic languages with such constructions in Persian, Hindi, and Japanese will shed light on the universals of verb form and meaning.
