| NSF Org: |
BCS Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | July 25, 2011 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | August 17, 2012 |
| Award Number: | 1053152 |
| Award Instrument: | Continuing Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Joan Maling
BCS Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences SBE Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences |
| Start Date: | August 1, 2011 |
| End Date: | June 30, 2015 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $327,960.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $327,960.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
FY 2012 = $122,346.00 |
| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
2385 IRVING HILL RD LAWRENCE KS US 66045-7563 (785)864-3441 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
2385 IRVING HILL RD LAWRENCE KS US 66045-7563 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): | Linguistics |
| Primary Program Source: |
01001213DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT |
| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.075 |
ABSTRACT
Using modern and historical texts, newspapers, and recordings from this Turkic language of Chinese Turkestan, this project creates the first comprehensive and diachronic annotated corpus (1895-2011) of a major Central Asian language. Its aim is to understand the typological development of complex verb constructions. Light verbs (sometimes termed "auxiliaries"), which are unusually plentiful in modern Uyghur, express semantic nuances such as speaker intention, irony, and agency. Graduate and undergraduate students will be mentored in multimedia corpus creation and text annotation and analysis. Work with native Uyghur speakers, together with quantitative and qualitative corpus work, will evaluate the origin and development of these complex verb constructions. A comparison of these analyses of Turkic languages with such constructions in Persian, Hindi, and Japanese will shed light on the universals of verb form and meaning.
PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH
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PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
The Uyghur Light Verbs project aimed to investigate certain universal properties of a subset of verbs in the world's language by creating and analyzing the first publicly available annotated corpus of Uyghur, a major Turkic language spoken in China.
In terms of intellectual merits, the project delivered the first understanding of the diachronic development of light verbs in a major Turkic language. Over time, these verb constructions developed in strikingly similar ways to those in other languages (e.g. Hindi and Persian), but with different properties that assist linguists in refining our understanding of verbal constructions.
The project created a primary resource of several hundred annotated texts, and made these resources freely available to the public via the website Chaghatay 2.0, at https://uyghur.ittc.ku.edu. The site provides a comprehensive overview of the project methodologies, sources, personnel, and workflow and representative publications, in addition to the annotated texts. The data can be re-used by researchers for further research. The current project thus contributes basic data towards the definition of a class of verbs, and it assists linguists in theorizing about other language structures as well. The project to date has resulted in at least 4 book chapters, 12 conference papers, 2 MA theses, and 2 in-progress doctoral dissertations.
The broader impacts of the project include the implementation of xml technologies in linguistics by piloting a schema and several query interfaces. Besides the deliverables mentioned above, the project tested an annotation interface to speed the linguistic coding and analysis of texts. This work, in testing and using xml technologies, relates to the disciplines of informatics and digital humanities. The language itself deepens our knowledge base in Chinese and Central Asian studies. Finally, a half-dozen students, both graduate and undergraduate (and including one REU) were mentored for this project; these students were able to acquire many technical and linguistic skills.As the first interlinear texts in this particular language online, and native and heritage speakers have expressed interest in the texts as a record of the language, past to present. Cultural and historical information is also particularly rich in these texts, and may well be of interest to the general public.
Last Modified: 12/29/2015
Modified by: Arienne M Dwyer
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