Referential Density in Tarahumara (Densidad Referencial en Tarahumara)

Abstract

This work constitutes a statistical study concerned with the behavior of referential elements in Tarahumara. It retrieves its main concepts from typological studies and functional linguistic theory, while trying to touch upon their concerns. Accordingly, this study intends to address the need for more discourse studies in indigenous languages, mainly in the area of referentiality, referential mechanisms and information structure. It is, for the most part, based on the Referentiality Project started by Christian Lehmann in 2012 at the University of Erfurt in Germany. This research project was envisioned towards a crosslinguistic text-based analysis of 12 unrelated, endangered languages that had nothing, but one thing in common: none of them had received much attention from researchers in general. Researchers that worked together in this project used data from The Language Archive (TLA). The 12 Languages studied as part of the Referentiality Project were: Aché (Tupi-Guarani, Paraguay), Baure (Arawakan, Bolivia), Beaver (Athabaskan, Canada), Chintang (Kiranti, Nepal), Gorani (Iranian, Iran), Hocak (Siouan, U.S.A.), Isubu (Bantu, Cameroon), Savosavo (East Papuan, Solomon Islands), Sri Lanka Malay (Austronesian, India), Teop (Austronesian, Bougainville), Vera’a (Austronesian, Vanuatu), Wichita (Caddoan, U.S.A.). The aim of the Referentiality Project was not only to establish a protocol for cross-corpus analysis for future research, but also to reach a better understanding of referential operations in the communicative process. Additionally, the Referentiality Project had the purpose of demonstrating the importance of unknown languages in theoretical linguistics, as they have the potential to “change our views of how languages function” (Lehmann 2012). Hence, Lehmann´s research project was not aimed at simply organizing data or testing existing hypotheses on these languages. Rather, the Referentiality Project was resolved to collect new or undocumented referential strategies and grammatical categories from unknown languages; it was open to language-specific categories that would later be mapped on cross-linguistic concepts, which can lead to novel research questions and hypothesis.