ABSTRACT This project is aimed at developing a better understanding of the discourse properties of the Seneca language, a Native American language whose grammatical and discourse patterns are maximally different from those of English and other more familiar languages. The study will be based on extensive tape-recorded samples of the Seneca language, presently spoken by about 200 people in western New York State, recordings that will also provide a permanent record of the language for present and future generations of the Seneca people. The number of speakers of Seneca is rapidly diminishing, and knowledge of how the language is used under natural circumstances by the last generation of fully fluent speakers must be obtained now or never. The project will combine the expertise of a linguist experienced in work with the Seneca language, whose primary theoretical interest is in discourse phenomena, and a Seneca speaker who has been actively involved in pedagogical and descriptive work on her language, whose other projects have put her in close touch with people from whom recordings can be obtained. The project will test hypotheses developed so far largely on the basis of English data, confirming or modifying them on the basis of data from a typologically distinct language.
