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Projekt Druckansicht

Eine korpus-gestützte kontrastive Studie von Tempus, Aspekt, Modalität und Polarität (TAMP) in Austronesischen Sprachen Melanesiens (MelaTAMP)

Fachliche Zuordnung Allgemeine und Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft, Experimentelle Linguistik, Typologie, Außereuropäische Sprachen
Afrika-, Amerika- und Ozeanienbezogene Wissenschaften
Angewandte Sprachwissenschaften, Computerlinguistik
Förderung Förderung von 2015 bis 2021
Projektkennung Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Projektnummer 273640553
 
Erstellungsjahr 2020

Zusammenfassung der Projektergebnisse

This project has made a three-fold contribution to the state of the art in linguistics: Theoretically, methodologically, and in terms of primary data. Theoretically, we have gained new insight into the expression of time and reality status of events in Oceanic and beyond. Time and reality are intimately linked: What has already happened is undoubtedly real, whereas future events might always turn out other than expected. In talking about time and reality, languages differ in which of the two dimensions they prioritize. Oceanic languages, in particular those of Melanesia, are often described as prioritizing reality status over temporal reference, but prior to this project, this claim could not really be tested, because of a severe lack of data from the relevant languages. We have accessed language-documentation data from seven Oceanic languages of Melanesia to investigate their ways of expressing temporal reference and reality status. Based on preliminary empirical observations, we developed a new theoretical approach within the tradition of temporal/modal logic and semantics to articulate very specific hypotheses and research questions. We further refined these on the basis of our data collections from language documentation. We then designed new stimuli for testing in the field. During a highly concerted effort, five international researchers collected new data with our stimuli in six of our subject languages, in remote locations in Vanuatu. Our results show that our subject languages vary significantly in whether they prioritize reality status over temporal reference. Our theoretical approach also allows us to model the rather gradient differences between languages that we found. We also did the first comparative survey of the expression of habitual aspect in this group of languages, that is, regularly recurring situations as in I go to college. We further investigated the relation between perfect aspect (I have been to Paris) and already and gained new insight into how the overlapping function of these expressions vary across languages. Methodologically, we wanted to highlight the vast potential of corpora from language documentation for comparative studies. This is one of the first project that has successfully tapped into the promise of this novel resource, which is still very hard to access and explore, especially for researchers who are not part of the language-documentation community. Our usage of these data was greatly facilitated by our research software engineer, who has also worked on the topic of sustainability of research software. In terms of primary data, this project has produced substantial amounts of new recordings, which have been fully transcribed, translated, and partially glossed. These include data from moribund languages such as Mavea, which only has an estimated 30 speakers left. Working with picture stories has proven to offer several significant advantages, in that it creates highly targeted, but still semi-spontaneous speech, semi-parallel corpus data for the investigation of language-internal and cross-linguistic variation, and the results can be used for the production of annotated picture books for speaker communities.

Projektbezogene Publikationen (Auswahl)

 
 

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