Doctoral Dissertation Research: The morphosyntax of motion in Hiaki

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Hiaki (often written Yaqui) is an endangered Native American language spoken in Sonora, Mexico, and in Arizona. University of Arizona graduate student Alexandra Trueman, under the supervision of Dr. Heidi Harley, will be conducting an investigation into the way that Hiaki expresses motion, particularly in complex multi-verb constructions in which a verb of motion or stance is modified by compounding it with another lexical verb.Variation in the expression of motion has been fertile soil for cross-linguistic comparison and controversy for decades. Talmy proposed a highly influential two-way language typology that has nevertheless come under review, in particular with regard to languages that employ multi-verb constructions. The degree of variability in language in this respect gives rise to an interesting question about language universality. This project will provide the first in-depth documentation and analysis of this structure in Hiaki, and explore the extent to which distinct word-formation processes can be said to map to identical underlying syntactic structures by comparing Hiaki with genetically and typologically distinct languages such as Korean and English.The study asks:1) What is the underlying structure of a Hiaki compound verb, particularly when the "head" verb is intransitive (and thus cannot take the second verb or verb phrase as its complement)?2) If we compare these constructions in Hiaki with languages with different surface morphosyntactic realizations, how do the allowable surface forms constrain the possible underlying structures?3) Is there evidence to suggest a cline or typology of complex motion constructions?Through close collaboration with native speakers the investigators will produce detailed documentation, description and analysis of complex motion constructions in Hiaki and a crosslinguistic comparison of these constructions. An existing database of transcribed and interlinearized Hiaki texts will be expanded, and pedagogical materials will be developed to promote Hiaki language learning and teaching.