Collaborative Research: Variation in Control Structures

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With National Science Foundation support, Drs. Maria Polinsky and Eric Potsdam will conduct two years of linguistic research on the omission of redundant information in sentences with a particular syntactic structure. In sentences with predicates such as 'try' and 'intend', the subject of trying/intention is identical to the subject of the sentence describing the intended event. Such identity is called a Control relation. This research project will systematically document the ways that natural languages realize the Control relation, something that has not been done before. The project also includes the development of a database of representative Control patterns in the world's languages. The research team will conduct fieldwork on three little-described languages: Malagasy (spoken in Madagascar) and Rutul and Tsaxur (spoken in Dagestan, NE Caucasus). The empirical findings will inform syntactic theory, which should be constrained so as to permit and model all and only the observed range of Control structures.This research will enhance scholarly understanding of several under-documented languages and advance linguistic theory by motivating modifications to account for Control structures. The project will also provide training for future researchers by involving graduate and undergraduate students in a unique collaboration between the University of California in San Diego and the University of Florida. Finally, the project will serve to establish contacts between linguists in the United States and linguists in Madagascar and Dagestan, where fieldwork for the project will be conducted.