2019 Fiscal Year Research-status Report
Comparative Semantics of Yaeyaman Verbal Morphology
| Project/Area Number |
18K12374
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| Research Institution | University of the Ryukyus |
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Principal Investigator |
クリストファー デイビス 琉球大学, 国際地域創造学部, 准教授 (80647339)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2018-04-01 – 2021-03-31
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| Keywords | Yaeyaman / fieldwork / semantics / honorifics / Taketomi / Kohama / Hatoma / Maezato |
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| Outline of Annual Research Achievements |
This year's research focused primarily on the collection, transcription, and analysis of dialog and story data from the Hatoma, Taketomi, Maezato, and Kohama dialects of Yaeyaman. Significant progress was made in the accurate transcription of dialog data recorded last year, using the "pear story" tasked described in my research proposal. A large focus of fieldwork this year was getting accurate transcriptions of these recordings, and an accurate understanding of the grammatical patterns that emerged therein. I also recorded and transcribed translations of an original children's story as a way of providing additional material for cross-dialectal comparison.
I also followed up on an original discovery involving the use of honorific verbal marking in three different dialects (Kohama, Hatoma, and Maezato) of Yaeyaman. Elicitation on these three dialects revealed subtle differences in the use of honorific verbal morphology with plural subjects of various kinds. The results of this research were accepted for an international conference (SALT), and will be presented and published later this year. This work will provide the basis for future work comparing the honorific systems of Japanese and Yaeyaman with those of other languages, in particular Thai and Balinese.
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| Current Status of Research Progress |
Current Status of Research Progress
2: Research has progressed on the whole more than it was originally planned.
Reason
Progress was made in transcribing and analyzing the naturalistic (corpus) data for four dialects (Kohama, Hatoma, Taketomi, Maezato), with the aim of completing the corpus in year 3. I also made progress in collecting translations of a story that will further serve in making cross-dialectal comparison possible for these dialects. Unfortunately, I was unable to extend my fieldwork to Kabira and Hateruma, as originally planned. I am not sure whether I will be able to include these dialects within the scope of the project.
On the other hand, I unexpectedly encountered usage of honorific verbal forms that was noticeably different than that in Japanese. I followed this up with targeted elicitation fieldwork, and made discoveries regarding the difference in use (pragmatics) of these forms in three different dialects of Yaeyaman and in Japanese. I submitted these results to an international conference and was accepted. The conference has been delayed due to the novel coronavirus, but presentation and publication are expected later this year.
There was thus one area of unexpected delay (no fieldwork on Kabira and Hateruma) but also an area of unexpected discovery and progress (comparative honorific verbal morphology research with conference presentation and publication).
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| Strategy for Future Research Activity |
Plans for fieldwork this year have been significantly affected by the novel coronavirus. I had originally planned to do fieldwork during the spring semester (April through August) of this year, but these plans will have to be postponed. I thus plan to focus my effort during this time on organizing the data I have collected thus far and preparing portions of it for archival. The spring semester (April through August) will likely be spent mostly on processing existing data, making digital transcriptions, correcting old transcriptions, and processing these data for use as corpus data.
I will be publishing an article comparing the honorific verbal morphology of several dialects of Yaeyaman, as described above. In addition, I plan to write another paper or papers describing other aspects of the verbal morphology and submit this for presentation/publication as well. These additional presentations/papers will likely focus on (1) the description and analysis of the dialog corpus created in the course of this project, and (2) a comparative description of the verbal paradigms of the core dialects examined.
Depending on how the situation with the novel coronavirus evolves, I hope to make my final fieldwork trips in the second half of year. These trips, if possible, will be focused on filling gaps in the transcriptions of existing recording, and filling gaps in the verbal paradigms based on existing data.
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