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Variation und Spracheinstellungen im Yurakaré: Auf dem Weg zu einer sprachvergleichenden Perspektive

Antragstellerin Dr. Sonja Gipper
Fachliche Zuordnung Angewandte Sprachwissenschaften, Computerlinguistik
Förderung Förderung von 2015 bis 2021
Projektkennung Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Projektnummer 275274422
 
Erstellungsjahr 2021

Zusammenfassung der Projektergebnisse

In this project, I set out to investigate variation and language attitudes in Yurakaré, a language isolate spoken by around 2,000 people in central Bolivia. A surprising finding regarding the nature of variability in the language is that sociolinguistic variation that can be linked to demographic factors does not appear to be overabundant. This insight pushed me to investigate other ways of looking at variability. Studying the local unfolding of lexical variation across utterance-response pairs, I demonstrate that speakers’ choices of lexical items are not independent of one another in conversation. In repetitional responses, speakers are more likely to reuse a non-conventionalized element from Spanish that occurred in the initial utterance than to replace it with an alternative Yurakaré term. On this basis, I proposed that repetitional responses constitute an interactional affordance for linguistic transmission. This idea led to the initiation of a new research group at the University of Cologne investigating the role of repetitional responses in language change (with Eugen Hill, Martin Becker and Pascal Coenen, funded by the FORUM line of the Excellent Research Support Programme of the University of Cologne). Another result of the project was that the frequency of use of non-conventionalized material from Spanish is not fixed for a speaker but rather varies according to the situation, contributing to expressing variable degrees of purist attitudes in interaction (Gipper to appear b). Moreover, it has been found that the ongoing language shift in the community from Yurakaré to Spanish is accompanied by a shift in language ontology on which attitudes are contingent. In another article, I show that speakers create lexical and grammatical variability in the low-diversity system of framing reported speech and thought relying predominantly on one single verb, ta ‘say’ (article currently under review). I furthermore contributed to a co-authored paper that demonstrates that inter-individual variability should be taken into account in corpus-typological studies in addition to language, in particular for variables that are semantic rather than structural in nature. Moreover, the development of eLAC (https://elac.uni-koeln.de/) was initiated, a platform for mobile access to data in the Language Archive Cologne to enable access to the data for speech communities. In collaboration with Yurakaré speaker and language activist Jeremías Ballivián Torrico, we laid the foundation for future investigations of variability in Yurakaré. Different types of data were collected for this purpose. Sociolinguistic interviews were conducted with 28 people, most of them in Yurakaré and Spanish (with additional funding from the Global South Studies Center, University of Cologne). In addition, we collected word list readings with 70 speakers to enable a large-scale investigation of vowel variation in the language as well as cross-linguistic comparison. We also contributed data to DoReCo (Language Documentation Reference Corpora, http://doreco.info/) to enable the study of phonetic variation in discourse in Yurakaré and cross-linguistically.

Projektbezogene Publikationen (Auswahl)

 
 

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