This dissertation project will make an important contribution to ongoing efforts in the field of documenting endangered languages by providing high quality original documentation materials for Southeastern Tepehuan (SET). The project has the dual purpose of providing much needed documentation of naturally-occurring speech in Southeastern Tepehuan or O'odam and of contributing to the linguistic analysis of clause union in this language, one of the least described languages of the Tepiman branch of the Uto-Aztecan family. This research constitutes an important step in data gathering and analysis which will permit comparisons with other Uto-Aztecan and non-Uto-Aztecan languages. The fieldwork period comprises eight months in La Guajolota, Mezquital (Tobaatam) to document different types of communicative events. The project will concentrate on the linguistic annotations and text analysis. Outcomes include 1) a corpus of 15-20 hours of transcribed, annotated, and analyzed SET texts, including audio and video recordings 2) the establishment of an O'odam Documentation Language Committee that will guide, advise and integrate the community in the task of documenting the language, 3) the creation of pedagogical materials for promoting language education and revitalization which will advance the needs of the community by establishing an accessible record of the language and 4) the analysis of clause union in Southeastern Tepehuan in the co-PI's doctoral dissertation.
The project outcomes will not only be of interest to the field of linguistics, but also to the fields of anthropology, archaeology, history, sociolinguistics and related fields by providing oral histories and local knowledge of the Tepehuans. The data, in addition to providing a deeper understanding of the language, can potentially be used to evaluate the models of migration and population of northern Mexico that have been proposed to date. The training of native Tepehuan speakers in language description, including methods and tools, will provide the skills necessary for local language documentation which will have an impact on both the acceptance and use of the resulting materials as well as improve the way people reflect on their own language. Additionally, the collected texts, as well the discussions of grammar, will be used to develop pedagogical grammars and materials in the local bilingual education programs.
Among the outcomes, this collaborative work has exceeded the goal established at the beginning of the documentation, which was to collect 15 to 20 hours of recordings. We were able to process 27 hours of material, of which 10 hours of the audio and video materials provide time-aligned transcriptions, multi-tier annotations, morpheme-to-morpheme, and free translations into Spanish capturing an unusual corpus based on formal and informal forms of narrations and dialogues. The initial stage of the endeavor focused on training speakers in the task of documenting the language. They mastered the use of audio and video equipment, as well as transcription methods, and the use of the appropriate software. This training helped us to gather and process the collected material prioritizing a community-based approach to documentation and language revitalization. It also had the additional impact of helping the community accept the resulting materials as well as improving the way people reflect on their own language. A supplementary aim of the project that came out, once the student researcher was working with community members, was to hold a linguistic workshop using the materials we gathered. This seminar facilitated the activity of training 30 Southeast Tepehuan teachers in basic linguistics focusing on the description and the analysis of the language (i.e. basic phonology, morphology, and syntax), and the discussion of some tools in the process of teaching. There is a huge interest among the native speakers in documenting and preserving their language, and especially among the teachers in learning more about the grammar, and the creation of pedagogical material. There is interest in continuing this process in the near future. In the second stage, the student researcher selected 10 hours out of the 27 of the material and provided multi-tier annotations and glosses for the sample. This portion gives prominence to Southeast Tepehuan oral literature in various genres including traditional stories, historical accounts, personal narratives, formal speeches, conversations, and songs. The student researcher has not yet completed her doctoral dissertation: Clause Union in Southeastern Tepehuan: A Uto-Aztecan Language of Northern Mexico, but she has made progress. This includes three preliminary chapters about the description of different strategies to code subordination in the language. Overall, this dissertation encompasses a description of the phenomenon of clause union; specifically investigating the functional and structural dimensions of event integration. Southeast Tepehuan shows an absence of a clear-cut boundary between one extreme (i.e. a complex clause) and the other extreme (i.e., one single event). It has various types of embedded and dependent clauses such as complement clauses, relative clauses, adverbial clauses, as well as non-embedded clauses, such as coordination, that have not been previously described. Additionally, this language also contains some juxtaposed verb phrases formed by the combination of two verbs with no overt subordination or coordination markers, which could be analyzed as exhibiting properties of a single event. These verbal structures are on a continuum from complex to simple clauses. Therefore, the data from Southeast Tepehuan will support and contribute to our understanding of clause linkage. Product: 27 hours of digital Southeast Tepehuan data are available to the researcher and the community. They will be placed in the Archive of Indigenous Languages of Latin America. Of the 27 hours of collected material, the student researcher has provided detailed annotation of 10 hours with free translations into Spanish.
