The goal of this project is to document the typologically rare morphological, syntactic and phonological patterns of the endangered Austronesian Language Atayal, and to compare its structure to that of another endangered language from the same family Saisiyat. The primary research objectives are: 1) to gain a better understanding of how information structure - the topic-focus structuring of the sentence - interacts with independent constraints on word order and with prosody; 2) to understand some typologically exceptional processes of word formation present in these languages. The languages investigated will provide us with important information about the linguistic structure of words and sentences, which helps us gain deeper understanding of cognitive processing. Since these languages are likely to no longer be spoken in a few generations it is important to document them now before they disappear, especially because these languages have typologically rare phenomena that may be especially informative to our understanding of linguistic structure. The project will explore how prosodic cues mark information structure in Saisiyat, in a detailed experimental setting that will 1) survey multiple native speakers, residing near Hsinchu, Taiwan, for acceptability judgments of sentences in their language, and 2) document native speakers reading question-answer discourse using the different word order(s). Saisiyat, an Subject-Verb-Object language, and Atayal, a Verb-Subject-Object language, providing for a rich comparison of word order possibilities and prosodic prominence. The research project will also investigate rare processes of word-formation, where single consonants are duplicated and combined to the word to indicate a grammatical function.
The aim of this project was to contribute to the description of the morphological properties of 2 endangered Austronesian languages, Saisiyat and Atayal. The Austronesian family is spoken on many Islands, from Madgascar in Africa to Easter Island in the Pacific. The original home of these languages is Taiwan, as has been determined through linguistic, anthropological, genetic, and archeological evidence. Indeed, most of the original subfamilies of Austronesian have only ever been spoken in Taiwan, and most of these languages are dying, taking away with them a significan portion of the human story. This project funded two graduate students to do field work in Taiwan to help document these dying languages. Original work was done under the grant on phonological, syntacic, and semantic properties of the languages, as they relate to morphological properties. This work has been presented at several conference presentations at major international conferences, as well as ongoing dissertation work by one of the students. Journal publications are also being prepared on these properties. In addition, many stories and myths were recorded by the students and the PI from the native speakers. These will be made freely available to to the public for linguistic or anthopological work.This work is part of an ongoing effort by linguists throughout the world to document language families that are dying at a fast rate, so that future generations can learn from the linguistic and cultural diversity that once existed. Since language is a fundamental part of human cognition, future attempts to understand the structure of human cognition will be hampered by the fact that most of the data will be gone in another generation. The specific work undertaken in the project analyzed several aspects in detail. First, the phenomenon of reduplication in these languages was analyzed in detail. In many languages, including the two studied, new words are made by taking a portion of a word and concatenating it to the left or right of that same word. Much has been learnt by linguists about the sound structures of languages by studying these types of phenomena, but in these two languages exceptional forms of reducplation have been reported, and were therefore studied and reported on. Second, in Saisiyat, the words in a sentence are placed in an unusual order, and is especiallys ensitive to the properties of the verbs in these sentenses. One of the students investigated this aspect in detail. Third, most languages have ways of refering to the aspectual relation between various events. These languages have unusual ways of morphologically expressing these relations, and are still being studied in detail by one of the students. The work funded by NSF was the start fo the project. Since 2012, when the initial data collection was started, More students have gotten involved, and several more trips have been undertaken, based on grants from different agencies to continue documenting these extremely interested languages. Indeed this work will continue for several more years.
