Doctoral Dissertation Research: Argument Licensing and Agreement

博士论文研究：论证许可和协议

• 批准号: 1122426
• 负责人: David Pesetsky
• 金额: $ 1.09万
• 依托单位: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2011
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2011-08-15 至 2013-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1122426&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Argument; Licensing

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.

人类语言的哪些属性是通用的，哪些属性可能因语言而异？回答这些问题将有助于我们了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架构。本论文项目旨在通过仔细研究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，祖鲁语是南非使用的一种未被充分研究的班图语。麻省理工学院博士生 Claire Halpert 在 David Pesetsky 和 ​​Norvin Richards 的指导下，将与南非和美国的使用者合作，对祖鲁语的句子结构进行语言学实地考察。她的研究重点是控制语言中口头协议复杂过程的因素。尽管祖鲁语中的动词几乎总是与其主语一致，但某些结构（包括一些具有特殊动词-主语词序的结构以及其中名词缺乏其他特征“增补”的其他结构）以独特的方式破坏了这种一致性关系。通过检查这些结构，这项调查将加深我们对动词和名词之间的联系以及名词被“许可”出现在特定语法位置的方式的理解。尽管祖鲁语有大约 1000 万人使用并且包含多种方言，但该语言中的许多方言差异仍然没有记录。哈尔珀特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，从而使人们对更广泛的语言变异有更细致的理解。该项目将记录祖鲁语在经历快速变化时的多种变体，捕捉该语言可能不会持续太久的阶段。 该博士论文研究改进奖将为有前途的学生建立强大的独立研究生涯提供支持。