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Investigating Chin Discourse Markers through Collaborative Fieldwork

J.C. Wamsley

University of Rochester

Lattimore 201

In this talk, I discuss my previous and current research on discourse deictics in the Chin languages, a group of languages in the South Central Tibeto-Burman family spoken primarily in Burma/Myanmar. Discourse deictics are words which encode semantic and pragmatic meaning, such as the spatial and temporal properties of discourse entities as well as their role in the events described in the discourse. My doctoral investigation of Chin discourse deictics utilized a field semantics research methodology wherein speakers of Hakha Lai, the most widely spoken Chin language, were presented with a discourse context and asked to provide translations of discourse utterances in an elicitation task and acceptability judgements on modified utterances in a follow-up task. This investigation was part of the Chin Languages Research Project, an ongoing collaboration between linguists and speakers of Chin languages at Indiana University with the goal of producing practical language resources for both linguists and members of the Chin diaspora community across the U.S. This talk outlines the Chin Languages Research Project, the research methodology and findings of my dissertation, and two projects which have emerged from the findings of my doctoral research on discourse deictics in Hakha Lai.