Emiliana Cruz, Ph.D. - US grants

An important dimension of language is the sound system and patterns of a given language. In fact, languages like English and Spanish include only a subset of the possible sounds of consonants, vowels, and the different ways they can combine. A greater understanding of what humans can produce and perceive in terms of sounds (phonetics) and how these sounds are organized and patterned (phonology) relies on investigation, documentation, and analysis of languages with different sounds and patterns than English and Spanish. This project will enable a conference to increase scientific understanding of how humans produce, perceive, and organize the phonetics and phonology of these diverse languages, focusing on a geographic region well-known for both its diversity and the urgent need to document this linguistic diversity in the face of language endangerment.


The goal of this project is to bring together indigenous and non-indigenous experts who study the linguistic diversity of the languages of Mexico and Central America. This workshop, the third iteration of "Sound Systems of Mexico and Central America (SSMCA 3)" will be held in October, 2018 at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Speakers will present scientific findings of the under-described and under-analyzed sound systems of the diverse languages of this part of the world. Besides plenary presentations from invited speakers, contributed presentations, and posters, the conference will include two roundtables. The first roundtable is devoted to discussing effective means of fostering collaboration between indigenous and non-indigenous scholars. The language sciences have seen tremendous intellectual advancement with the training of speakers of indigenous languages as linguists; this will seek to continue that advancement with a focus on phonetics and phonology. The second roundtable is focused on a broader impact of many language documentation projects, and will present effective means of translating language documentation into pedagogical materials that can be used in the schools to develop and promote literacy in indigenous languages and to maintain their use in indigenous communities. Additionally, SSMCA 3 will have four broader impacts: (1) promoting scholarly interaction and collaboration between indigenous and non-indigenous linguists in the task of documenting indigenous languages, (2) advancing the documentation of the un-described and under-described languages of Mexico and Central America, (3) publicizing the value of maintaining the indigenous languages of Mexico and Central America and the necessity of incorporating their use into public education, and (4) providing open access to all the presentations and materials from the conference online to any interested person.

The project will address the complex ways in which social, civic, economic, and linguistic factors interact to provoke or prevent the accelerated process of language shift of indigenous languages. Simultaneously, it will document a specialized genre. Growing evidence shows that more specialized genres and knowledge in languages are vulnerable to attrition. Through an analysis of particular linguistic elements, the project will provide greater detail about an endangered language that displays a highly complex morphological system. Because the topic is limited to a particular kind of specialized speech (the matters of state), the analysis will also expand knowledge about the role of sociolinguistic and other factors in the linguistic shift, including linguistic ideologies about who should speak a language, how and where it should be spoken. The focus will be on Nahuatl (ISO 639-3 NHE), a Uto-Aztecan language possessing a complex morphology of prefixes and suffixes that interacts with the discursive content of speech. This complex morphology (quite different than English morphology, for example) creates a testing bed for how specialized genres interact with specific aspects of a language, here extensive suffixing and prefixing processes, as well as how different speakers use the same grammatical elements in different ways. Project activities include the development of pedagogical materials, a workshop for elementary school teachers in the village, and the training of two native speakers in linguistic documentation methodologies. Broader impacts include the training of a doctoral student, a public repository of audio and video recordings and transcriptions archived at the University of Texas, Austin's AILLA repository, and the strengthening of collaborations between Mexican and American scholars.

The project will expand knowledge about the linguistic and extra-linguistic factors that influence the maintenance or the shift of one language to another. The project will collect video and audio recordings of the oratory taking place in assemblies made up by women-only, men-only, and mixed groups from Nahua Mexican society to identify rhetorical strategies such as persuasion. This language is spoken in various parts of Mexico; this project will specifically document the variety located on the east-central side of the country. Usage will be analyzed for speaker variation as pertains to particular grammatical elements, as well as more "poetic" kinds of constructions such as metaphor, alliteration, parallelism, anaphora, and metonymy. Through the analyses of grammatical constructions in these civic- and economic-oriented genres, the CoPI will investigate how grammatical constructions and linguistic strategies used in governmental contexts are used by language users to accomplish social goals during the course of speeches on policy and civic topics. An analysis of the markers for linguistic categories like direction or future, frequently found in this specialized genre, will lead to a better understanding of their grammatical properties as well as how speakers of Nahuatl use these structures for different purposes. The researcher will use linguistic ethnography as the central methodology, supplemented by in-depth interviews. Ethnography is a methodology that includes linguistic investigation, participant observation, and recording of spontaneous speaking interactions. The results will provide insights not only for linguistics but also for sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and anthropology.

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.