Doctoral Dissertation Research: Documenting Tense, Aspect, Mood and Polarity in a Language with a Complex Verbal System

Time is an important notion that pervades many aspects of daily life. Time is of such importance that all attested human languages have at least one grammatical strategy to encode temporal relationships. Most languages, however, have relatively complex systems of encoding time (which are generally referred to as tense/aspect systems) that interact with several features of the grammar. Individual tense/aspect systems, in addition to their internal complexity, also vary significantly from language to language. Because of the cross-linguistic variation that has been observed, any given language has the potential to offer new insights into the extent of possible temporal encoding strategies, as well as the extent of possible meanings that tense and aspect can carry. The language of study for this project, Iyasa (yko), is a Bantu language spoken in the Littoral Region of southwestern Cameroon by approximately 2,000 people. Tense/aspect studies in Bantu are especially critical as the systems in these languages are noted as being among the most complex in the world. This project will, thus, provide a thorough documentary and descriptive record of Iyasa's system of tense and aspect, utilizing methods in both linguistic fieldwork and linguistic analysis in order to uncover the nuances of the system. Broader impacts include the professional development of a doctoral student, the publicly accessible data, and the presence of an American linguist in Cameroon to help maintain and improve the academic relationship between the two nations. Additionally, the research project and its products can bring linguistic awareness and attention to a language, region, and community of speakers currently under-represented in scientific literature. Records of tense/aspect systems of endangered language vary greatly in quality from mere labels of each tense and aspect (leaving it to the reader to assume what precise meanings should be associated with each label) to descriptions where nearly every detail related to tense and aspect is included. In order to achieve an adequately detailed description of the Iyasa tense/aspect system, researchers will make use of a wide variety of methodologies. These methodologies include (but are not limited to) administering tense/aspect questionnaires both already developed and newly developed by researchers on this project, analyzing of tense/aspect in natural narrative and conversational discourse, directed semantic elicitation (where a series of contexts that differ only slightly in meaningful ways are provided by the researcher), and directed narratives that are elicited by means of video clips or storyboards. Another important aspect of this project is that it will incorporate insights from a wide range of theories including cognitive theories of tense and aspect that move away from the notion of time as a single linear timeline. This project, in addition to providing important documentary materials and linguistic training opportunities to the Iyasa community, will provide important insights on how to improve computational models of tense and aspect for natural language processing and help strengthen our general understanding of how humans can and do encode time in language. 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.