Doctoral Dissertation Research on the Morphosyntax of Bukusu

在国家科学基金会的支持下，Michael Diercks和Paul Portner正在对Bukusu的句法(即句子结构)进行研究，Bukusu是肯尼亚西部的一种班图语。本研究的重点是布库苏语中主语的几个有趣的性质(相对于非主语，如宾语或间接宾语)。例如，在英语中，关于物体的问题使用单词do：“你喜欢谁？”然而，关于主题的问题不会用“do”：“谁喜欢你？”语言学家的工作是找出是什么导致了这样的不对称，以及为什么它们存在于人类语言中。布库苏语对此很有帮助，因为它有许多与主体性有关的前缀，这些前缀在类型学上是罕见的，观察这些前缀的属性有助于阐明主体性的属性。此外，一些使用这些前缀的句子类型对现有的语言学理论来说是有问题的，这使得它们成为一个有趣的研究主题。通过这种方式，这个项目具有双重目的：从布库苏语言中发现新的语言数据，并探索这些数据如何为人类语言能力理论做出贡献。

With National Science Foundation support, Michael Diercks and Paul Portner are conducting research on the syntax (i.e. sentence structure) of Bukusu, a Bantu language spoken in western Kenya. This research focuses on the several interesting properties of subjects in Bukusu (as opposed to non-subjects such as objects, or indirect objects). In English, for example, a question about an object uses the word 'do': "Who do you like?" A question about a subject, however, does not use 'do': "Who likes you?" The job of the linguist is to identify what causes asymmetries like these, and why they exist in human language. The Bukusu language is helpful to this end, as it has a number of prefixes related to subjecthood which are typologically rare, and looking at the properties of these prefixes helps illuminate the properties of subjecthood. In addition, a number of sentence types which use these prefixes are problematic for existing linguistic theory, making them an interesting topic of investigation. In this way this project has a dual purpose: to discover new language data from the Bukusu language, and to explore how those data contribute to the theory of the human faculty of language.