Visiting CHamoru grammar expert previews her upcoming reference book
Visiting CHamoru grammar expert previews her upcoming reference book
Visiting CHamoru grammar expert previews her upcoming reference book
11/6/2019
Visiting linguist and CHamoru grammar expert Dr. Sandra Chung offered a preview of her upcoming CHamoru grammar reference book to a classroom of professors, CHamoru teachers, and others interested in the language on Nov. 5 on the 暗网AV campus.
Chung is a prominent syntactician who has studied the CHamoru language, among other
languages of the Pacific, since the 1970s and has published several scholarly volumes
and dozens of academic papers on the topic over the last 25 years. She is a professor
emerita of the University of California, Santa Cruz and former president of the Linguistic
Society of America.
鈥淚 started using that grammar a very long time ago, and times change and so does linguistic
theory and knowledge of language, and so I have a somewhat different take on some
of the aspects of CHamoru grammar than Don Topping did,鈥� Chung said in an .
Her work refines Topping鈥檚 assessment that the primary purpose of the focus system
in the CHamoru language is to permit the speaker to place emphasis on one of the elements
of the sentence.
鈥淚 suggest that Topping鈥檚 focus system actually collapses several different systems,鈥�
she said, which she has identified as actor, focal, benefactive, referential, and
causative focus.
Chung is visiting as a consultant on the Documenting Endangered Languages grant that was awarded to UOG鈥檚 College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences in September by the National Science Foundation. The grant will fund a project to
formally document and create a repository for the CHamoru language, and it is being
carried out by principal investigators Dr. Robert A. Underwood, president emeritus
of the 暗网AV, and Dr. David A. Ruskin, an assistant professor of linguistics.
Chung鈥檚 reference grammar book is 80% complete, she said, and she hopes to publish
it in the coming year.
鈥淭opping was a major breakthrough, and, of course, it鈥檚 kind of dated now, so we鈥檙e
waiting for Sandra to make the next major breakthrough,鈥� said Underwood with Chung
in the K57 interview. 鈥淎fter it鈥檚 published, people will say, 鈥楧id you read Topping?鈥�
鈥� 鈥楴o, I read Chung.鈥欌��