Doctoral Dissertation Research: Negation strategies in an endangered language

It is a universal of human language that if something can be expressed, it can also be negated. Yet the ways that languages encode the negation of sentences and smaller phrases varies quite a lot between languages and even between different types of utterances in the same language. This doctoral dissertation project enhances linguists' understanding of this variation by documenting the use of negation strategies in an endangered and under-documented language. Using this documentation, the co-PI describes and analyzes how various types of clauses and phrases in the language are negated and compares this with other negative strategies that exist in the world's languages. The project helps linguists to understand variation in negation and how negation interacts with other aspects of the language being documented. This analysis and documentation of a central but poorly understood and unusual aspect of the language's grammar provides an important resource for the community to preserve its language. The project also trains community members in documentation and data processing techniques, empowering them to study their own language and diversifying the field of linguistics. Using established methods for language documentation and fieldwork, both naturalistic and elicited speech are recorded in the target language. These recordings are transcribed, translated, and analyzed in consultation with native speakers. Data from related languages as well as other languages from around the world are used for a comparative analysis, contributing to the typological study of negation strategies. The language under study has clausal negation makers that show agreement with the subject of the clause, so the research advances linguists' understanding of how agreement and negation are connected. This doctoral dissertation project is made as part of a funding partnership between the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities for the NSF Dynamic Language Infrastructure – NEH Documenting Endangered Languages Program. 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.