This project investigates the encoding of events with three participants, such as transfer events (e.g. GIVE, SEND) or communication events (e.g. ASK, TELL) in a number of unrelated languages. The expression of three-participant events shows a high degree of constructional variation, both cross-linguistically and within individual languages, and thus presents challenging problems for linguistic typology and theory. The project uses corpora of (small) endangered languages that have been compiled within DoBeS documentation projects. The languages involved are: Beaver, Bora, Movima, Saliba-Logea, Savosavo, Totoli, Vera’a, and Waima’a.

Contact: Anna Margetts

Movima is a genetically unclassified language spoken in the Moxos region in the savannahs of the Bolivian Amazon area. It is still spoken by more than 1,000 people. Most speakers are over 50 years old and bilingual in Spanish. In remote areas there are still a few children who learn the language; elsewhere, the children are raised in Spanish only. Today, efforts are being made to implement the language at schools.
One aim of this project is to create a database of annotated audio- and video recorded texts from as many different speakers as possible. We also work on a dictionary and on a grammatical description in Spanish, as a basis for teaching material that can be used at school. Most of the work takes place at the Linguistics Department in Cologne. Every summer we do field work in Santa Ana, collecting data and coordinating the work with the native speakers.

Kontaktperson: Dr. Katharina Haude

The RHIM project explores morphosyntactic systems that are based on a hierarchy of referents – first and second person ranking over third, humans over non-humans, and known referents over unknown ones. This hierarchy is known to influence the structure of grammatical relations (the basic “who does what to whom in an event”), giving rise to e.g. inverse morphology or differential argument marking.

Contact: Dr. Katharina Haude