Cette thèse présente une description morphosyntaxique du parler occitan alpin du village d’Usseaux situé dans le Haut Val Cluson, en Italie, dans la province de Turin. La langue y est décrite dans une perspective synchronique, mais se base en partie sur des études diachroniques des parlers voisins et majoritairement sur une étude de corpus. La thèse comprend également une partie sociolinguistique importante qui entraînera une réflexion plus large sur la diversité linguistique, les langues en danger et en contact, et la méthodologie de terrain. Elle comprend également une esquisse phonologique du parler, ainsi qu’une réflexion sur la graphie. La problématique principale, au delà de la description, consiste à montrer que ce parler situé en périphérie d’un espace linguistique, s’il est indéniablement un parler occitan, présente de nombreux traits le rapprochant des parler d’oïl et du francoprovençal, plutôt que des parlers occitans « centraux » tels que le provençal et le languedocien. / This thesis presents a morphosyntactic description of the Alpine Occitan language spoken in Usseaux, a small village located in Val Chisone (Italy, Province of Torino). The language is described following a synchronic perspective, but is also partly based on diachronic studies of neighbouring villages and valleys, and mainly on a corpus analysis. The thesis also describes the sociolinguistic profile of Usseaux’s speech community, leading to some thoughts about linguistic diversity, endangered languages and fieldwork. It also presents a phonological sketch, as well as a chapter on the written form of the language. The main issue of the thesis is to show that this language, which is located at the periphery of a linguistic area, is undeniably a variety of Occitan, but shows many common traits with the oïl language and with Francoprovençal as compared with more ‘central’ varieties of Occitan like Provençal and Languedocian.

The Shanghainese language is currently in danger of becoming extinct. An increasing number of Shanghainese youth born in the 1990s are unable to speak Shanghainese. The Shanghai government officially issued a paper on the teaching of Shanghainese in Shanghai kindergartens in May, 2013 as a way of maintaining and developing Shanghainese. As a result, 20 public kindergartens were selected to start the teaching of Shanghainese on a trial basis in September. 2014. The purpose of this study is to document the implementation, understanding and perceptions regarding the teaching of Shanghainese in Shanghai kindergartens. More specifically, this study includes a detailed description and analysis of the teaching of Shanghainese in three Shanghai kindergartens (one demonstration kindergarten, one first-level kindergarten and one second-level kindergarten). Using a multi-case study approach, three kindergarten principals, six kindergarten teachers and six parents were interviewed separately. Sources of data include observations, audio-recorded interviews, and documents. In general, the teaching of Shanghainese across the three kindergartens is primarily implemented by an increase in the daily use of Shanghainese, the use of ballads in Shanghainese, and playing Old Shanghai alley games in Shanghai kindergartens. By applying Krashen’s acquisition and learning hypothesis and input hypothesis, the teaching of Shanghainese is implemented with an attempt to create an acquisition-rich learning environment for children to acquire Shanghainese with sufficient comprehensible input. However, there is much more that needs to be done in creating an acquisition-rich learning environment and for there to be a sufficient and quality comprehensible input in helping children learn Shanghainese. The results contribute to our fledgling knowledge about the teaching of dialect in general and specifically in Shanghainese kindergartens for teachers, administrators, and policy makers.

What explains the shape of Zauzou noun phrases? Zauzou (Trans-Himalayan, China) noun phrases exhibit considerable diversity in both the choice of the phrase's primary reference type, and the presence of classifiers, demonstratives, modifiers, and case marking. This investigation uses a large, previously existing Zauzou textual corpus. The corpus was annotated for variables hypothesized to predict the variation in noun phrase form. Syntactic variables investigated include word order, subordination, subordinate role, and a new variable called "loneliness." Participant semantic variables include thematic role, agency, and affectedness. Referential semantic variables include boundedness, number, and animacy. The information packaging variable investigated is accessibility. Statistical analysis of the corpus revealed that case marking was predicted using a variable called "loneliness." This is where a multivalent verb has only one argument that is explicitly referenced in the clause. Lonely noun phrases are more likely to be case marked. The role of loneliness in motivating case marking confirms that disambiguation can be an explanation for differential case marking. Animacy and accessibility are important predictors of noun phrase weight. Overall, high animacy and high accessibility correspond to reduced noun phrase weight. Agency and thematic role were also significant variables. The Zauzou data makes clear that speech act participants occupy a unique role in the animacy hierarchy. Speech act participants are often unexpectedly light upon first mention, being referred to with a pronoun or zero anaphor. They are often unexpectedly heavy while highly activated, remaining a pronoun instead of reducing to a zero anaphor. Zauzou, like Mandarin and Cantonese, allows classifiers to be used with a noun but without a numeral. In Mandarin, this construction is used only with new or generic noun phrases. In Cantonese, this construction can be used with noun phrases of any accessibility value. Zauzou occupies a unique intermediate position. In Zauzou, a noun with bare noun phrase can occur with new or old noun phrases, but rarely with active ones. This thesis provides evidence for the importance of text corpora. Using a corpus allowed for the simultaneous inclusion of many variables as well as the consideration of genre effects. In addition, the annotated corpus produced in this investigation is an important output; it is available in the supplemental materials accompanying this thesis.

Throughout the world, languages are becoming extinct at an alarming rate. Perhaps half of the 6,000-7,000 languages worldwide will go extinct in the next 50-100 years. One of these dying languages, Chinook Jargon or Chinuk Wawa, a language found in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, is in the process of being revitalized through the concerted efforts of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde (CTGR). Reasons to revitalize endangered languages often seem irrelevant to our modern daily lives, and revitalizing these languages is a difficult process requiring much dedication, commitment, and persistence. In light of this significant struggle, understanding people's motivations could contribute to a better understanding of how to involve more people in language revitalization. Ideally, such an understanding would contribute to strengthening a community's efforts to revitalize their language. This exploratory, ethnographic case study explores the motivations of eight participants in the Portland Chinuk Wawa language community involved in revitalizing Chinuk Wawa over a nine-month period in 2011. The results of the study showed that seven major themes of motivation were prevalent for the participants: connections made through Chinuk Wawa, preservation of Chinuk Wawa, relationships, instrumental motivation, affective motivation, identity motivation, and demotivation.

This dissertation is a descriptive grammar of Yongning Na (Mosuo), a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in southwestern China. The theoretical approaches taken are functional syntax and the discourse-based approach to language description and documentation. The aim of this dissertation is to describe the ways that the language's features and subsystems intersect to make Na a unique entity: analyticity; zero anaphora; OV word order; topic/comment information structure; a five-part evidential system; a conjunct/disjunct-like system that intersects with evidentiality and verbal semantics; prolific grammaticalization; overlap between nominalization and relativization and associated structures; representation of time through aspect, Aktionsarten, adverbials, and discourse context; and the Daba shamanic register. / text

This thesis is a descriptive grammar of Ambel [wgo], an endangered Austronesian (South Halmahera-West New Guinea) language. Ambel is spoken by approximately 1600 people on Waigeo, the largest island in the Raja Ampat archipelago (West Papua province, Indonesia). This grammar is based on naturalistic and elicited data, collected by the author from native speakers of Ambel. Ambel is a head-marking language, with basic SV/AVO constituent order. There are 14 native consonant phonemes and five vowel phonemes. Ambel has a tone system, in which /H/ syllables contrast with toneless syllables. Neither stress nor vowel length are contrastive. In verbal clauses, the subject of the clause is marked on the verb. This system makes a four-way number distinction (singular, dual, paucal, and plural), an animacy distinction in the third person, and a clusivity distinction in the non-singular first person. The Ambel noun phrase is mainly head-initial. There are five distinct morphosyntactic possessive constructions, the choice of which is primarily determined by a lexical specification on the possessed noun. Some nouns (including most body parts and some kin terms) are possessed in one of three constructions in which the person, number, and animacy of the possessor is marked directly on the possessed noun, while most other nouns are possessed in one of two constructions in which the possessor is marked on a prenominal possessive classifier. Within the clause, all negation particles and most aspect and mode particles are clause-final. There is no passive construction. Ambel has a rich system of spatial deixis, in which six different classes of deictic words (such as demonstratives, deictic prepositions, and deictic nouns) are derived from one of four demonstrative roots or 28 directional stems. Verb serialisation is used to express, among other things, purposive motion and changes of state. This thesis is the first major description and documentation of the Ambel language. As such, it will be of considerable interest to typologists and historical linguists, as well as others interested in the languages, cultures, and history of New Guinea. All of the data on which this grammar is based have been archived with both the Endangered Languages Archive, and the Center for Endangered Languages Documentation at Universitas Papua in Manokwari. The data will thus be available to future generations, including the Ambel community themselves.

El objetivo de este trabajo es analizar las actitudes actuales hacia la variedad mapudungun dentro de sus estudiantes en Chile. Existen diferentes tipos de estudiantes, diferentes edades y motivaciones que conllevan al estudio de esta lengua ancestral. Para conseguir nuestros objetivos, realizamos algunas encuestas y entrevistas con el fin de analizar el estado de la cuestión actual. Hemos comprobado que, a pesar de las desavenencias con la sociedad chilena, las actitudes hacia el mapudungun han mejorado positivamente, además existen entidades dedicadas al trabajo de revitalización, lo que ayuda a obtener un respaldo del gobierno para trabajar, aunque a pasos lentos, en la revitalización de la lengua. / The purpose of this essay is to analyze the current attitudes towards the mapuche language among its students. There are different kinds of students, varieties of ages and motivations that entails the study of this ancestral language. To achieve our objectives, we conducted an interview and a few surveys to analyze the current state towards the variety. We have confirmed that despite the disagreements with the Chilean society, the attitudes towards the mapuche language have improved positively, additionally to this, we found there are entities dedicated to the work of revitalization, which helps to get governmental support, even if at a slow pace, they are working on the language revitalization.

The purpose of this study is to document the indigenous Romance language of the Sark island located in the English Channel, known as Sark Norman. As implied by the thesis title, the original aim of the field research was to codify the orthographic form of the Sark Norman language, using previous scientific observations and the assistance of the final remaining native speakers in order to commence a gradual revitalisation of Sark Norman. In the course of the research, however, we were confronted with facts that resulted in renouncing our original aim. It emerged that the existing scientific knowledge of the Sark Norman phonology system was unsatisfactory. By contrast, some authentic historical documents, until then unknown within the scientific field, were explored and validated. Therefore, the primary purpose of this study became to introduce principal findings of the field research carried out on the Sark island in 2016 with the aim of deepening the scientific knowledge of a very unique Romance language, including disproving the biggest myths related to Sark Norman within the scientific environment.

This thesis examines evolution in the phonology of Guernesiais, the endangered variety of Norman French indigenous to the Channel Island of Guernsey. It identifies ways in which modern Guernesiais phonology differs from previous descriptions of the variety written between 1870 and 2008, and identifies new patterns of phonological variation which correlate with speaker place of origin within the island. This is accomplished through a combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses of a new corpus of speech data. The relationship between the data and other extralinguistic variables such as age and gender is also explored. The Guernsey 2010 corpus was gathered during linguistic interviews held with forty-nine adult native speakers of Guernesiais between July and September 2010. The interviews featured a word list translation task (English > Guernesiais), a series of socio-biographical questions, and a self-assessment questionnaire which sought to elicit information about the participants’ use of Guernesiais as well as their responses to questions relating to language revitalisation issues. The interviews resulted in over 40 hours of recorded material in addition to a bank of written socio-biographical, behavioural and attitudinal data. Analysis of the phonetically transcribed data revealed that a number of phonological features of Guernesiais have evolved, perhaps owing to greater contact with English or through other processes of language change such as levelling. Shifting patterns of diatopic variation indicate that south-western Guernesiais forms are spreading northwards, and this is echoed in the findings of the socio-biographical data. New evidence of diatopic variation in final consonant devoicing and word-final post-obstruent liquid deletion was also found. This thesis concludes that there is still considerable variation in the pronunciation of modern native speakers of Guernesiais, and that this correlates with place of origin within the island. While northern Guernesiais forms have not disappeared entirely, south-western Guernesiais appears set to become the de facto standard for the variety, especially as the political impetus for revitalisation is generated from this area of the island.

La documentation et description du huastèque du sud-est (code d’Ethnologue HSF), une langue Maya du Mexique, est un projet doctoral en cotutelle entre l’ University of Sydney, Australie et l’Université Lyon 2 Lumière, France. La première partie de cette these (le Volume 1) consiste en la description grammaticale de cette langue Maya: sa phonologie, sa morphologie et sa syntaxe, ainsi que la description de l’expression de l’espace dans cette langue. Le Volume 2 de cette thèse représente les contes en HSF, une description deétaillée du projet de documentation, un long résumé en français, et les matériels pour la revitalisation de la langue. / The documentation and description of South Eastern Huastec (Ethnologue code HSF), a Mayan language from Mexico, is a PhD project carried out in cotutelle between the University of Sydney, Australia and the Université Lyon 2 Lumière, France. The first part (the Volume 1) of this thesis is a grammatical description of this Mayan language: its Phonology, Morphology, and Syntax, as well as its Space encoding. The second volume (the Volume 2) of this thesis comprises HSF stories, a detailed description of the documentation project, a detailed summary in French, and the HSF revitalization materials.