Doctoral Dissertation Research: Case Marking and the Left Periphery in Dinka

人类语言既是人类思维的复杂功能，又是使用者群体的重要文化资源。考虑到这两个事实，本项目研究丁卡语的句子结构，丁卡语是一种未被充分研究的尼罗河语言，具有独特的结构特性，在南苏丹和美国日益增长的散居社区中使用。美国的许多难民社区在保存和传播他们的母语方面面临困难，特别是当描述这种语言的出版资源很少时。Coppe货车Urk先生将与波士顿侨民社区合作，提供关于该语言的深入文献和分析，并将提供给社区。此外，这项研究将编制一本丁卡族儿童故事集，作为难民社区的一种资源。与此同时，这个项目将调查丁卡语语法的一系列方面，这些方面挑战了目前关于通常被认为是所有语言共有的特征的想法。特别是，这项研究着眼于“长距离依赖”（问题和类似的结构）的语法和他们的相互作用的情况下，协议。大多数句法结构理论认为，长距离依存的语法与支配格标记和动词一致的过程完全不同，这反映了研究充分的语言的事实。然而，在丁卡人中，远距离依赖与大小写标记和协议的变化密切相关，这表明这种分离并不普遍。因此，对丁卡语的研究有望推进和改变我们对人类语言几个基本方面的看法。

Human language is simultaneously a complex function of the human mind and a vital cultural resource for communities of speakers. With both of these facts in mind, this project investigates the sentence structure of Dinka, an understudied Nilotic language with unique structural properties, spoken in South Sudan and in a growing diaspora community in the US. Many refugee communities in the US face difficulties in preserving and transmitting their native language, particularly when there are few published resources describing the language. Working with the Boston diaspora community, Mr. Coppe van Urk will provide in-depth documentation and analysis of the language, which will be made available to the community. In addition, this study will produce a collection of Dinka children's stories as a resource for the refugee community. At the same time, this project will investigate an array of aspects of Dinka grammar that challenge current ideas about features usually thought to be common to all languages. In particular, this research looks at the syntax of "long-distance dependencies" (questions and similar constructions) and their interaction with case and agreement. Most theories of syntactic structure view the grammar of long-distance dependencies as entirely distinct from the processes that govern case marking and verb agreement, reflecting the facts of well-studied languages. In Dinka, however, long-distance dependencies go hand in hand with changes in case marking and agreement, suggesting that this separation is not universal. Research on Dinka thus promises to advance and change our view of several fundamental aspects of human language.