Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Syntax and Semantics of Applicative Morphology in Bantu

博士论文研究：班图语应用形态学的句法和语义

• 批准号: 1451566
• 负责人: John Beavers
• 金额: $ 1.28万
• 依托单位: University of Texas at Austin
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2015
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2015-03-15 至 2017-02-28
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1451566&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Syntax; Semantics

Language serves not just as a means of communication but also a window into how humans perceive and categorize the world. Words define basic categories of objects or situations, and contrasts between words with similar but subtly distinct meanings provide clues as to what properties of the world humans find significant. One of the most tantalizing results of the last several decades of linguistic work on word meaning is that a word's meaning also figures into its grammatical properties and can constrain the grammatical contexts in which it occurs, albeit in regular and systematic ways, offering still further clues as to how humans perceive the world. However, the relationship of word meaning to grammar varies among languages. Thus it is important to have a diverse sampling of languages in order to capture the full spectrum of how languages describe the world. This dissertation investigates the grammatical and semantic relationships between word meaning and grammar in the Bantu languages of Sub-Saharan Africa. More broadly, this study incorporates a new set of languages into work on the semantic underpinnings of grammar, an area that to date has focused heavily on European languages. It also promotes academic research on the languages and cultures of Africa, which is important for improving international collaboration. There are many misunderstandings about Africa in American society, especially relating to the geographic, cultural, and linguistic diversity of the people who inhabit the African continent. The inclusion of African languages in linguistic research promotes more dialogue between Western and African voices. The specific research question concerns the semantics of Bantu "applicative" morphology, a type of optional suffix on a verb that, when present, typically introduces a new participant into the event described by the verb, expressed as a new direct object. While previous approaches to this phenomenon generally predict that the applicative morphology should behave uniformly across all verbs, this study demonstrates that there is a significant interaction of verb and applicative meaning in determining what the semantic function of the applicatives is and the grammatical effects it has.This in turn gives us new insights into how verb meaning constrains the overall grammatical structure and interpretation of the sentence and thus ultimately to how languages construe situations in the world. This dissertation investigates applicative morphology in three Bantu of Eastern Africa: Kinyarwanda (Rwanda), Chichewa (Malawi), and Lubukusu (Kenya). It uses standard elicitation techniques to collect data from native speakers from these different linguistic groups, creating a rich new database of original data, to be analyzed using state-of-the art techniques for analyzing syntax and semantics and the relationship of the two. The outputs are thus a rich new dataset for further research, and also new insights into the universality of human languages and human cognition regarding how speakers construe events in the world.

语言不仅是一种交流手段，也是人类如何感知和分类世界的窗口。词语定义了物体或情况的基本类别，具有相似但微妙不同含义的词语之间的对比为人类发现世界的哪些属性具有重要意义提供了线索。在过去几十年里，语言学对词义的研究取得了一个最令人兴奋的成果，那就是一个词的意义也体现在它的语法属性中，并且可以限制它出现的语法语境，尽管是以有规律和有系统的方式，这为人类如何感知世界提供了进一步的线索。然而，词义与语法的关系因语言而异。因此，重要的是要有一个不同的语言样本，以捕捉语言如何描述世界的全方位。本文探讨了撒哈拉以南非洲班图语中词义和语法之间的语法和语义关系。更广泛地说，这项研究将一组新的语言纳入语法语义基础的工作中，迄今为止，这一领域主要集中在欧洲语言上。它还促进对非洲语言和文化的学术研究，这对改善国际合作很重要。美国社会对非洲有许多误解，特别是对居住在非洲大陆的人们的地理，文化和语言多样性的误解。将非洲语言纳入语言学研究，促进了西方和非洲声音之间的更多对话。具体的研究问题涉及班图语“应用”形态的语义，这是一种动词上的可选后缀，当出现时，通常会将一个新的参与者引入到动词所描述的事件中，表示为一个新的直接宾语。虽然以前对这一现象的研究通常认为应用形态在所有动词中的表现应该是一致的，本文的研究表明，动词和应用义在决定应用义的语义功能和语法效果方面存在着显著的交互作用，这反过来又使我们对动词义如何制约句子的整体语法结构和理解有了新的认识从而最终研究语言如何改变世界的状况。本论文研究东非三个班图语：卢旺达的基尼亚卢旺达语、马拉维的齐切瓦语和肯尼亚的卢布库苏语的应用形态学。它使用标准的启发技术从这些不同语言群体的母语人士那里收集数据，创建一个丰富的原始数据新数据库，使用最先进的技术分析句法和语义以及两者之间的关系。因此，这些输出是一个丰富的新数据集，可供进一步研究，也是对人类语言普遍性和人类认知的新见解，即说话者如何描述世界上的事件。