Schedule 74. StuTS

As part of my practical semester I was able to conduct online fieldwork. I worked together with speakers of the indigenous language of the Mariana Islands called Chamorro (alternative spelling: CHamoru). Due to the colonization of the Spanish Empire starting from the 16th century until the end of the 19th century it was heavily influenced by Spanish and adopted a lot of Hispanisms. One of the borrowed words, and the focus of this project, is the article un. It integrated itself into the system of determiners that previously consisted of the common article i and the zero article. This integration interferes with the definiteness based split-ergative system. un is used to introduce new discourse participants which are high in topicality and are specific-referential. They are known to the speaker but not to the listener. When an object is high in topicality and definiteness an ergative-absolutive pattern is very likely to be used. As topicality and definiteness is a continuum, un is being used for a more distinct measurement. Before the Spanish influence, the common article i was used instead of the borrowed un. My goal for the fieldwork was to find out when exactly the un article is being used and how far the integration into the system of determiners has progressed. I created an online questionnaire with different Chamorro sentences for the participants to fill out. At first I presented them with multiple versions of the same sentences which only differed in the topicality and definiteness of the object and asked about their grammaticality. Afterwards I presented them with sentences with un from the Chamorro corpus in which I replaced the un with either the common article i or the zero article and asked about their grammaticality again.

Articles about our project from summer last year were published in our university's newspaper up2date and in a Guamanian newspaper called The Guam Daily Post. Furthermore our research team (consisting of me and two fellow students) was invited by the Micronesian Area Research Center (MARC) to participate in an international conference to showcase our research.

Info

Day: 2023-10-26
Start time: 12:00
Duration: 00:30
Room: NIG Raum 1
Track: Typology and Variational Linguistics
Language: en

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