Syntactic and Phonological Interactions in the Makassar Languages

该项目将研究印度尼西亚南苏拉威西望加锡语系语言的句法和音系之间的相互作用。随着印尼语的影响越来越大，望加锡语面临着在未来几代内灭绝的严重危险，这些语言有丰富的词缀和限定词，这些词缀和限定词除其他外，还表明主语和宾语的一致性、确定性、占有性和多元性，以及衍生词法的各个方面。它们是检验关于句法和韵律结构之间关系的假设的沃土。该项目的目的是：(i)提供这些语言的词缀系统的详细描述；（ii）将这种描述建立在对两种语言的句法和音系的仔细分析之上；（iii）研究两种语言的句法、形态和韵律结构之间映射的一般原则；（iv）将这些结果置于语法理论比较方法的更广泛背景中；（iv）编制并广泛提供一个数据库，作为对印度尼西亚语言和/或项目所涵盖的任何语法领域感兴趣的研究人员的资源。该项目有可能通过提供一个鲜为人知的、很少被研究的语言群体的部分语法、形态学和音韵学的完整文档，以及对语法理论数据含义的广泛调查，进一步促进我们对人类语言结构的理解。

This project will investigate the interactions between the syntax and phonology of languages of the Makassar group from South Sulawesi, Indonesia. The Makassar languages, which with the increasing influence of Bahasa Indonesia are in serious danger of becoming extinct within the next few generations, have a rich inventory of affixes and clitics that signal, among other things, subject and object agreement, definiteness, possession, and plurality, and various aspects of derivational morphology. They are a fertile ground for testing hypotheses concerning the relationships between syntactic and prosodic structure. The aims of the project are (i) to provide a detailed description of the affixal system of these languages; (ii) to ground this description in careful analysis of both the syntax and the phonology of the languages; (iii) to investigate the general principles governing the mapping between the syntactic, morphological, and prosodic structure of the languages; and (iv) to place these results in the wider context of a comparative approach to grammatical theory; and (iv) to prepare and make widely available a database which will serve as a resource for researchers interested in Indonesian languages and/or in any of the grammatical areas covered in the project. The project has the potential to contribute to the further development of our understanding of the structure of human language by providing a thorough documentation of parts of the syntax, morphology, and phonology of a little known group of uncommonly studied languages, and extensive investigation of the implications of the data for the theory of grammar.