Construction of an intergenerational dialogue corpus and discourse study of Taroko, a language in danger of extinction

2021 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 19K21624
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Challenging Research (Exploratory)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Review Section: Medium-sized Section 2:Literature, linguistics, and related fields
• Research Institution: Tohoku University
• Principal Investigator: Koizumi Masatoshi 東北大学, 文学研究科, 教授 (10275597)
• Project Period (FY): 2019-06-28 – 2022-03-31
• Keywords: オーストロネシア語族 / タロコ語 / 危機言語 / 対称態 / 談話研究 / コーパス

Outline of Final Research Achievements

The purpose of this research is to create a corpus of Taroko (Austronesian, Taiwanese) dialogues with video clips, make it available to the public, and use the data to conduct research on discourse grammar. The plan at the time of the proposal submission was for the PI, accompanied by graduate students and other research collaborators, to visit Taiwan, record spoken dialogues with Taroko speakers, and create a corpus based on the recorded data to conduct research on discourse grammar.
However, with the spread of COVID-19, it was no longer possible to go to Taiwan from Japan. We asked a local collaborator to film the speeches and dialogues in order to create a corpus with video clips based on CHILDES. We also proceeded to transcribe them into writing.

Free Research Field

言語学

Academic Significance and Societal Importance of the Research Achievements

タロコ語は若い世代に継承されなくなりつつある危機言語であるため、今すぐに記録や研究を行わなければ永遠にその機会が失われてしまう可能性が高い。流暢な母語話者が残っている現時点で、異なる世代の対話の記録を残しておくことは、タロコ族の言語と文化の継承において非常に重要な意味を持つ。また、タロコ語はVOSを基本語順とする能格言語であり対称態をもつなど、言語類型論的に極めて珍しい。それを記録に残し談話文法の研究を行うことは、学術的にも社会的にも極めて重要である。