2012 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

Documentation of Haida morphosyntax

Research Project

Project/Area Number	22520429
Research Category	Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
Allocation Type	Single-year Grants
Section	一般
Research Field	Linguistics
Research Institution	Shizuoka University
Principal Investigator	HORI Hirofumi 静岡大学, 人文社会科学部, 准教授 (10283326)
Project Period (FY)	2010 – 2012
Keywords	ハイダ語 / 北米先住民諸語 / 言語類型論 / 記述言語学
Research Abstract	This project aims to gain a comprehensive understanding of the Haida language, one of the First Nations languages spoken in Haida Gwaii (or the Queen Charlotte Islands) off the northwest coast of British Columbia in Canada. The project, mainly focusing on the morphosyntax of Haida, clarifies some of the verbal elements which are relevant to transitivity such as instrumental prefixes and causative affixes. It also reexamines if the term “polysynthesis” can be applicable to Haida, and concludes that the language should not be characterized as polysynthetic in the proper sense of the term, based on the fact that the number of morphemes per word is constrained by semantic factors as well as by the present-day speakers’ preference for analytic expression to synthetic one.