{"id":111645,"date":"2016-04-18T09:43:35","date_gmt":"2016-04-18T13:43:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=111645"},"modified":"2016-04-19T09:08:33","modified_gmt":"2016-04-19T13:08:33","slug":"uconn-linguist-wins-guggenheim-fellowship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2016\/04\/uconn-linguist-wins-guggenheim-fellowship\/","title":{"rendered":"UConn Linguist Wins Guggenheim Fellowship"},"content":{"rendered":"

Far in the northeast of Siberia, sandwiched between the Bering Sea to the east and the Sea of Okhotsk to the west, lies the Kamchatka peninsula: a mass of land similar in size and latitude to Great Britain, but subarctic in its climate, mountainous in its terrain, and isolated in its way of life.<\/p>\n

Itelmen, a native language of this distant corner of Russia, is on the verge of extinction. In 1991, it had 100 native speakers, and in 2008 about 40. Now there are only five.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not just that it\u2019s a cultural loss to see a language like Itelmen go, says Jonathan Bobaljik, professor and head of the Department of Linguistics in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. There\u2019s also a wealth of information about the underpinnings of human language to be found within it.<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom a linguist\u2019s perspective, Itelmen happens to have a system that doesn\u2019t look like anything else we\u2019ve seen,\u201d he says. \u201cWe can learn really interesting things about language from these languages, from the remote corners of the globe, that are lesser-studied.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

What’s really exciting is when the change we make to accommodate new observations from lesser-known languages generate surprising new predictions about familiar languages. — Jonathan Bobaljik<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Bobaljik has been studying this critically endangered language for 20 years. His work to understand and document Itelmen, and his efforts to use it to further the understanding of language as a whole, have earned him a 2016 Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The fellowship is one of the highest national honors available to scholars, and is awarded in recognition of exceptional capacity for productive scholarship and creativity. The award will help Bobaljik further a universal theory of language, one of the central questions in the field.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt seems like the machinery that\u2019s running underneath all the world\u2019s languages is very similar,\u201d he says. \u201cYou can look at all these thousands of languages that on the surface look very different. But, at a slight level of abstraction, they are in many ways all the same.\u201d<\/p>\n

The understudies<\/strong><\/p>\n

Roughly 50 percent of the world\u2019s people speak one of only 15 languages. Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, English, Hindi, and Arabic are the top five. But with more than 7,000 languages spoken in the world today, Bobaljik says, that leaves a lot about which very little is known.<\/p>\n

A main question that interests linguists is trying to formalize the systems that govern languages, with the goal of combining them into a universal theory that can explain how all the world\u2019s languages work. As a relatively young scientific field \u2013 by some accounts, just over 50 years old as a formalized science \u2013 it has focused mostly on Indo-European languages and a handful of other widely spoken ones, such as Chinese and Japanese.<\/p>\n

With so much data on these major languages, it\u2019s easy to use them as a basis for a formalized theory. But leaving out so many other languages makes the theory incomplete, says Bobaljik.<\/p>\n

In recent years, more and more indigenous languages like Itelmen are being studied, he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cLarge chunks of the linguistics field are looking at a wider variety of languages: more indigenous languages, more languages outside what we\u2019ve traditionally studied,\u201d he says. \u201cWe\u2019re now at a point where we\u2019re expanding the empirical base of the field and can ask more detailed questions.\u201d<\/p>\n

A universal grammar<\/strong><\/p>\n

Bobaljik\u2019s 2012 book, Universals in Comparative Morphology<\/em>, used data from more than 300 languages to create a formal generative typology, or map of the different types of languages, and postulates several rules about their structure that seem to be universal.<\/p>\n

For example, in English, the comparison of ‘good’ is irregular: we say \u201cgood,\u201d \u201cbetter,\u201d and \u201cbest\u201d instead of \u201cgood,\u201d \u201cgooder,\u201d and \u201cgoodest.” Instead of accepting these examples as unexplainable quirks, linguists think there are overarching rules that may explain even these irregular patterns, and even limit the ways in which a pattern can be irregular.<\/p>\n

\"Jonathan<\/a>
Linguists are trying to formalize the systems that govern languages. Guggenheim Fellow Jonathan Bobalijik believes that studying less-familiar languages can further the understanding of the major languages. (Peter Morenus\/UConn Photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In his new project, Bobaljik will continue his search for these universals by looking at agreement systems, or how the different words in a sentence agree with one another.<\/p>\n

In English, for example, a verb must change its form to agree with a subject: we would say \u201cI go\u201d and \u201cshe goes.\u201d But in about half of the world\u2019s languages \u2013 many of which are rare and under-studied \u2013 many more of the words in a sentence must agree with each other. Itelmen is one of these languages, and will make a great starting point for comparison, he says.<\/p>\n

“You can start with a small set of data and make predictions about languages we haven’t previously studied,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe find that some of our predictions are wrong, and science moves forward by revising our theories to accommodate these new observations,\u201d he continues. \u201cWhat’s really exciting is when the change we make to accommodate new observations from lesser-known languages generate surprising new predictions about familiar languages. We can look at these results and say wow, we\u2019ve learned something about these languages from questions we never thought to ask.”<\/p>\n

Bobaljik thinks that the addition of more languages to the theory will certainly make the theory more complete. But he also has confidence in the foundation the field of linguistics has already built.<\/p>\n

And he hopes his other work, including video and audio documentation projects of Itelmen, will give its heritage speakers, the children and grandchildren of the last generation of native speakers, a culture they can remember.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf we can show that the kinds of postulates we have, based on Indo-European languages, need only a little bit of tweaking to extend them to unrelated languages of the globe, then we will know it\u2019s a robust theory,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd Kamchatka is one of the farthest corners of the globe.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The fellowship will support linguistics professor Jonathan Bobaljik\u2019s work using an endangered language to further a universal theory of how language works.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37,"featured_media":111569,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2226,88,2225],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[1860],"class_list":["post-111645","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-clas","category-global-affairs","category-uconn-storrs"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-30 08:00:02","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111645","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/37"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=111645"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111645\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":111680,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111645\/revisions\/111680"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/111569"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=111645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=111645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=111645"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=111645"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=111645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}