Phrase Structure and Clausality in VSO Languages

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The proposed research addresses some issues which are fundamental to linguistic theory and which, despite repeated and intensive efforts, have so far resisted resolution. The basic issue is the formulation of a model of universal grammar which can account satisfactorily for the syntactic patterns found in languages in which the verb and its object phrases are adjacent, such as English or Japanese, and also languages in which they are separated by the subject, the VSO languages of the title of this project. The investigators will study in depth three different VSO languages, Chamorro, Berber, and modern Irish, and will continually compare and contrast their findings on the three languages, attempting to arrive at the strongest general claims that can be made. The three languages are chosen because of their genetic and geographical diversity, and because each of the three investigators has been engaged in long-term intensive study of one of them. The three investigators all have leading international reputations as acute linguistic theoreticians with unusually keen abilities at linguistic description as well as theory. Each of them has been extremely productive of work of the highest caliber over a long period of time. Their collaboration on this project offers the best promise one could hope for of a fundamental new advance in our understanding of the basic structure of language.