A corpus-based reference grammar of Hocank, a Siouan language of Native North America.

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Johannes Helmbrecht (†)
• Subject Area: Applied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics
• Term: from 2013 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 237221042

The goal of the project is the development of a corpus based grammar of Hocank, a highly endangered language of North America. This will be the first comprehensive grammar of this language which is otherwise only poorly documented and described. Corpus linguistic search procedures will be applied to the Hocank text corpus that was established during a documentation project (DOBES initiative) funded by the Volkswagen Foundation (2003-2008). In a first step, the Hocank DOBES text corpus will be expanded with fieldnotes of the author and material which was elicited during the work on the Hocank lexicon. In a second step, the corpus linguistics search procedures for each grammatical topic will be developed and applied to the full corpus. These search procedures represent semasiological and onomasiological research questions. The software that will be applied for the corpus searches are PoioAnalyzer, Elan, and Toolbox.The hits will be analyzed and summarized in a grammar which will appear in two different versions. The first version will be a print version that cointains a rich index of topics. This print version will resemble traditional reference grammars. The second version is a hypertext document that will be made available online. The linking structure of this document allows users to find information on grammatical questions - from a semasiological or onomasiological perspective - easily. The planned grammar of Hocank will be a scientific asset for language typology as well as for descriptive and documentary linguistics. It will show the typological peculiarities of this language - and there are quite a few - within the system of the whole language. The empirical methods to be developed will bring forward descriptive linguistics and documentary linguistics, since the search procedures will be generalized and may be applied to other similar corpora of endangered languages too. Documentary linguistics will profit from this project in two respects: first, it will be demonstrated that it is in deed possible to develope a descriptive grammar from the data collected by a documentation project. And secondly, it will be a grammar of a language that will disappear probably within the next 15 or 20 years completely.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants