Doctoral Dissertation Research: Non-verbal predication and the syntax of information structure in Wolof

信息结构涉及信息在话语中的包装方式。语言学中一个长期存在的问题是研究信息结构属性（例如信息焦点和主题）与语法功能（例如主语和谓语）之间的关系。有证据表明，特定的信息结构因素在某些情况下会触发某种句法结构，但在其他情况下则不会，反之亦然。该主题的一个特别富有成果的研究领域是系动词，其中主要谓语是动词以外的某个类别：形容词、名词等（例如“约翰是学生”中的“学生”）。 以前的许多研究都集中在它们的信息结构上，经常声称某些类型的系动词具有固定的信息结构，而另一些则没有。然而，这些调查大多基于对英语和其他一些印欧语言的观察，这些语言没有显示出对话语信息结构属性的公开标记。当前的项目将这项研究扩展到包括尼日尔-刚果语言沃洛夫语，它使用多种形态句法手段来标记其句子的信息结构，因此特别适合调查手头的问题。在 Karlos Arregi 博士的指导下，Martina Martinovic 女士将进行实地考察，调查两种沃洛夫交配结构，每种结构对应不同的信息结构概况。初步数据表明，它们的分类与迄今为止基于其他语言假设的系动词从句的类型学不符。该项目遵循了一种日益增长的研究趋势，即使用来自待研究语言的数据来为语言理论提供信息。它将采用各种领域方法，特别关注嵌入在自然语言上下文中的目标句子的引出。沃洛夫语的研究结果将涉及跨语言概括、理论问题以及对系动词句子类型学及其属性的普遍性的影响。

Information structure concerns the way in which information is packaged within utterances. A longstanding question in linguistics investigates the ways in which information-structural properties, such as informational focus and topic, are related to grammatical functions such as subject and predicate. There is evidence that a particular information-structural factor triggers a certain syntactic structure in some cases, but not in others, and vice versa. A particularly fruitful area of research of this topic are copular sentences, in which the main predicate is some category other than a verb: an adjective, a noun, etc. (e.g. "a student" in "John is a student"). A lot of previous research focuses precisely on their information structure, often claiming that some types of copular sentences have a fixed information structure, while others do not. However, those investigations are mostly based on observations about English and a few other Indo-European languages, which do not show overt marking of information-structural properties of utterances.The current project expands this research to include the Niger-Congo language Wolof, which uses a variety of morphosyntactic means to mark the information structure of its sentences, and is thus particularly suitable for investigating the question at hand. Under the direction of Dr. Karlos Arregi, Ms. Martina Martinovic will conduct fieldwork to investigate two Wolof copular constructions, each corresponding to a different information-structural profile. Preliminary data show that their classification does not match the typology of copular clauses that has been assumed so far based on other languages. This project follows a growing trend of research which uses data from understudied languages to inform linguistic theory. It will employ a variety of field methodologies, especially focusing on the elicitation of target sentences embedded in a natural language context. The findings on Wolof will be related to cross-linguistic generalizations, theoretical questions, and the implications for the typology of copular sentences and the universality of their properties.