Corpus building and corpus-based grammatical studies on Nganasan

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Beáta Wagner-Nagy
• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: from 2013 to 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 246706378

The scheduled project aims at compiling a corpus based reference grammar of the Nganasan language. The main task in the project will consist in building a digitized annotated corpus to be published online and made accessible to the scientific community, thus allowing for further scientific investigations on Nganasan. Such a corpus of considerable size that would allow for various search options is not available for Nganasan yet and is, even compared to other relevant projects on small Uralic languages, an innovative output. Nganasan is a highly endangered language numbering as few as ca. 125 speakers living on the Taimyr Peninsula in Northern Siberia. Despite the considerable efforts that have been made to collect, systematize and publish Nganasan language data so far, the nature and quality of these data make further steps in the documentation of the language necessary. Most of the published texts represent folklore genres; spontaneous speech and conversation are especially rare among the available data. Part of the texts is glossed, but not comprehensively annotated. Several grammars of Nganasan have been compiled to date. However, they do not present up-to-date accounts of the language, as they mainly take a semasiological approach and, thus, facilitate typological analysis to a limited extent only.One output of the project will consist in an annotated corpus containing language data collected so far and, a smaller share to be collected during the project. The corpus will be interlinked and published online, which will allow a free use of the corpora for the purposes of linguistic research. A second output of the project will be a grammar based on evidence derived from the corpus as well as on newly elicited data. The planned grammatical research will concentrate on syntactic studies of Nganasan, which represent a scarcely investigated research domain in Uralic studies. With the aim of supplementing the existing text corpus with texts of certain types and of eliciting data for the reference grammar, two field trips, in the first and second year of the project, will be carried out. It has to be emphasized that, given the actual sociolinguistic situation, the project will very probably involve the last speakers of Nganasan, which lends special importance and urgency to the project.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants