| Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha) |
NAKAYAMA Toshihide Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, Assistant Professor, アジア・アフリカ言語文化研究所, 助教授 (70334448)
HORI Hirohumi Shizuoka University, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Assistant Professor, 人文学部, 助教授 (10283326)
SASAMA Fumiko Osaka Gakuin University, Faculty of Informatics, Assistant Professor, 情報学部, 助教授 (60330114)
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| Budget Amount *help |
¥14,900,000 (Direct Cost: ¥14,900,000)
Fiscal Year 2006: ¥6,100,000 (Direct Cost: ¥6,100,000)
Fiscal Year 2005: ¥3,700,000 (Direct Cost: ¥3,700,000)
Fiscal Year 2004: ¥5,100,000 (Direct Cost: ¥5,100,000)
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| Research Abstract |
In this research project, almost all the participants were able to conduct fieldwork in Canada during the three year period. We were able to discuss various aspects of the research among ourselves and also with linguists abroad. All the languages studied in this project (Sliammon, Nootka, Haida, and Coast Tshimshian) are spoken by a limited number of elderly speakers, and are therefore in danger of disappearing. The linguistic data gathered through this project, therefore, is invaluable as a record of these languages.
The goal of this research was, however, not only to document the languages in question, but to conduct a cross-linguistic comparison of their morph syntactic traits. The languages of the Northwest Coast of North America form a 'language area' that shares a number of language phenomena, many of which are uncommon and of great interest to general linguistics. Such phenomena include 'polysynthesis' and the problem of classifying word-classes.
Through this project, we came to realize that, among the typological questions, the notion of polysynthesis is quite problematic and unexpectedly complex. All the languages studied in this project are classified as polysynthetic, according to the morphological typology. 'Polysynthetic' is usually defined as a language in which a word may be formed with many morphemes, and thus one word may contain many concepts forming what would be expressed in a sentence with many separate words in other types of languages. However, although the languages in question clearly belong to the polysynthetic type, their manifestation of the high degree of synthesis is quite different from one another. Through this project, we were able to clarify certain characteristics of these languages as regards what make them polysynthetic, and also we began to understand this complex question of the notion of polysynthesis.
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