Doctoral Dissertation Research: Argument Licensing and Agreement

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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.