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Speaker Use of Grammatical Voice in Lacandón

Speaker Use of Grammatical Voice in Lacandón. Connecting Data with Metadata. Introduction.

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Speaker Use of Grammatical Voice in Lacandón

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  1. Speaker Use of Grammatical Voice in Lacandón Connecting Data with Metadata

  2. Introduction • Lacandon Maya has a number of different grammatical voices that are used in varying frequency by different speakers. It is possible to discover the socio-linguistic use of grammatical voice in Lacandon discourse, by relating the consultant information in the metadata to the annotated texts in which the different voices occur. We will demonstrate how this is done and offer some preliminary findings. First, we will give a general overview of Voice in the Yucatecan Mayan languages, and the patterns of use of this grammatical category found in our Lacandon texts. We will then outline the method we used to explore the sociolinguistic use of Voice, and demonstrate the process in a step-wise fashion. Voice • Voice is an overt grammatical category pertaining to verbs. • Voice is well developed in Mayan languages. • Lacandón Maya has a number of different grammatical voices that are used in varying frequency by different speakers.

  3. Patterns of voice in Yucatecan languages • Abbreviations: RTV root transitive verb, IV intransitive verb, TV transitive verb, DTV derived transitive verb, CVC verb root, V verb stem, -Vl vowel + l suffix • Note: Major/Minor voice distinction from Hofling (1997).

  4. Examples of voice in Lacandón • Canonical passive ts’ah T. give ts’aba k’uxu7 achiote is given. (Nar_Forest_CK) ts’ah-b-Vl k’uxu7 give-PASS-IIS achiote • Agentless passive ts’apah. be given ts’ap ti7 chEk xok. He was given to the mermaid. (ChakXok_KM) ts’ah-p-ah PREP. chEk xok give-PASS-DTR PREP. red siren • Antipassive tsikbarnah. he chatted. (Chak_Xok_BM) tsikbal-n-ah chat-AP-CIS

  5. The questions • Do Lacandón women use passive voice more than men? • Do Lacandón women use antipassive voice more than men?

  6. Search options • Shoebox Only works on open files. Cannot provide information on consultants. • WinGrep Searches all files. Provides customizable output. Cannot provide information on consultants other than the name of the speaker. • A relational database best suits our needs.

  7. Converting Shoebox texts to Access tables • Create tab-delimited files from Shoebox texts • Put each record into its own row with each field delimited by a tab

  8. Search Results • Approximately 7,800 annotated records • Only 27 examples of canonical and agentless passive • 54 examples of antipassive

  9. Male to female ratio of all transcribed records in Lacandón corpus • The corpus is not evenly divided between male speech and female speech. • Men have a higher percentage of speech in our database. • This ratio is considered when determining usage statistics.

  10. Passives

  11. Antipassives

  12. Passives and Genres • Narratives have the highest frequency of passive use. • Descriptive type texts have far fewer passives than expected.

  13. Complications • Almost impossible to search for morphologically unmarked forms. • Antipassive is overtly marked in the completive aspect, not in the incompletive aspect. • Other considerations necessary for more elusive linguistic elements.

  14. Demonstration • Canonical passive and agentless passive are glossed PASS.

  15. Perl script Access Import

  16. Perl script Access Import

  17. Convert texts to tab-delimited files • Each tier of annotation becomes a column. • Each column is separated by a tab. • Each record becomes a row.

  18. Perl script Access Import

  19. Import tab-delimited file • Import the tab-delimited file into Access to create a texts table. Access Import

  20. Texts Table

  21. Perl script Access Import

  22. Import consultant information • The information for each consultant is imported from the files the IMDI metadata editor creates.

  23. Consultants table

  24. Entering session information • Access cannot easily import the IMDI files in a usable format. • Session information is entered manually at this time.

  25. Content table • Filename and text genre are the only fields in this table. • More fields may be added later.

  26. Perl script Access Import

  27. What relationships can do for you

  28. Creating a query • Find PASS in morpheme gloss field • Provide the value of the speaker field. • Lookup and return the sex of the speaker.

  29. Passives query – Datasheet view

  30. Danziger, Eve. 1990. A Clamour of Voices: Processes of Intransitivization in the Mayan Language of the Greater Yucatan Peninsula. Paper presented Dec. 2 1990 in “Mayan and Chibchan Languages”, at the 29th Conference on American Indian Languages, American Anthropological Association Meetings, Nov. 29 – Dec. 2, 1990, New Orleans. Hofling, Charles Andrew and Felix Fernando Tesucún. 1997. Itzaj Maya-Spanish-English Dictionary. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City. Bricker, Victoria, Eleuterio Po’ot Yah and Ofelia Dzul de Po’ot. 1998. A Dictionary of the Maya Language As Spoken in Hocabá, Yucatan. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City. TAM Tense/Aspect/Mood (Hofling 1997) RTV root transitive verb IV intransitive verb TV transitive verb DTV derived transitive verb CVC verb root V verb stem, -Vl harmonic vowel -l IIS Incompletive intransitive status (Hofling 1997) DTR Detransitive (Hofling 1997) CIS Completive intransitive Status (Hofling 1997) PREP Preposition AP Antipassive PASS Passive Inc Incompletive Aspect Com Completive Aspect References and Abbreviations

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