Doctoral Dissertation Research: Argument Licensing and Agreement

人类语言的哪些特性是通用的，哪些特性可能因语言而异？探究这些问题将有助于我们理解人类独特的语言能力，我们希望通过这种能力深入了解人类思维的整体结构。本论文项目旨在通过仔细调查祖鲁语中发现的几种相互关联的语言现象来进一步实现这一目标，祖鲁语是南非一种未充分研究的班图语。麻省理工学院博士生克莱尔·哈尔珀特将在大卫·佩谢茨基和诺文·理查兹的指导下，与南非和美国的发言人一起对祖鲁语的结构进行语言学实地考察。她的研究集中在控制语言中口头协议复杂过程的因素上。虽然祖鲁语中的动词几乎总是与主语一致，但某些构式（包括一些具有特殊的动词-主语语序的构式，以及另一些名词缺乏其他特征性"增强"的构式）以独特的方式破坏了这种一致关系。通过研究这些结构，本研究将推进我们对动词和名词之间的连接以及名词被"授权"出现在特定语法位置的方式的理解。虽然祖鲁语有大约1000万人使用，并且包含多种方言，但语言中的许多方言差异仍然没有记录。Halpert的实地考察将开始纠正这种情况，记录祖鲁语语法结构的几个关键方面的方言变异，从而更细致地了解语言变异。该项目将记录祖鲁语的多种变体，当时该语言正在经历快速变化，捕捉可能不会持续很长时间的语言阶段。 这个博士论文研究改进奖将提供支持，使有前途的学生建立一个强大的独立的研究生涯。

Which properties of human language are universal, and which may vary across languages? Answering these questions will help us understand the unique human capacity for language, through which we hope to gain insight into the overall architecture of the human mind. This dissertation project aims to further this goal through a careful investigation of several interrelated linguistic phenomena found in Zulu, an understudied Bantu language spoken in South Africa. MIT doctoral student Claire Halpert, under the supervision of David Pesetsky and Norvin Richards, will conduct linguistic fieldwork on the sentence-structure of Zulu, working with speakers in South Africa and the US. Her study focuses on the factors that govern the complex process of verbal agreement in the language. Though verbs in Zulu nearly always agree with their subjects, certain constructions (including some with special verb-subject word order and others in which a noun lacks an otherwise characteristic "augment") disrupt this agreement relation in unique ways. By examining these constructions, this investigation will advance our understanding of the connectons between verbs and nouns and the ways in which nouns are "licensed" to appear in particular grammatical positions.Although Zulu is spoken by roughly 10 million people and encompasses multiple dialects, numerous dialect differences within the language remain undocumented. Halpert's fieldwork will begin to remedy this situation, documenting dialectal variation in several key aspects of Zulu grammatical structure, and will thus allow for more a fine-grained understanding of linguistic variation more generally. The project will document multiple varieties of Zulu at a time when the language is undergoing rapid change, capturing the language at a stage that may not persist for long. This Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career.