CAREER: Documentation, description, and analysis of multiword tone and harmony systems in four languages

This CAREER project investigates linguistic systems across multiple languages. Each year of the project, the PI trains a team of undergraduate and graduate students in language methods, and the team travels to work with communities of each of the target languages. The team records natural speech in each language and elicits specific words and sentences in order to document aspects of the grammar. The recorded materials are archived for future use by linguists, other academics, and speaker communities. This work advances knowledge about linguistic theory and typology and contributes to language data that can inform the development of AI systems. The project strengthens existing scientific collaborations among academics and builds relationships with communities. The languages studied in this project all display morpheme-specific phonological processes that cross word boundaries. In one language, the imperfective aspect is marked by a shift in tone that affects the verb as well as the subject of the sentence. Morpheme-specific cross-word phonology is not well documented across languages, so this study contributes to typological knowledge. Additionally, most formal theories of the interaction between morphology and phonology predict that morpheme-specific phonology should be limited to word or sub-word domains. The data from harmony and tone in these languages shows this is an incorrect prediction. A deeper understanding of the boundaries of cross-word morpheme-specific phonology, and whether they align with morphosyntactic or prosodic boundaries, informs debates on what formal mechanisms are needed to account for interactions between morphology and phonology across languages. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.