Doctoral Dissertation Research: Investigating the Universality of the Subject Requirement through a Language With Overt Correspondents for Postulated Null Subjects

据估计，世界上大约7000种语言中，超过一半的语言正处于消失的边缘，而其他许多语言在更长的时间内也面临着类似的未来。一种语言的消失意味着文化和智力财富的损失，无论是对使用这种语言的群体来说，还是对科学群体来说，语言多样性为理解人类语言的整体本质提供了一个至关重要的自然实验室。这个项目调查了一种语言的独特的和科学上有意义的句子结构，这种语言仍然被一个合理规模的语言社区使用，但由于英语和更大的区域性语言的侵蚀，它面临着未来威胁的明显迹象。（bwu），在加纳的Sandema使用的一种Gur （Mabia）语言。在许多学科中，抽象的元素是假定的，但不能直接观察到，比如物理学中的夸克。B& ugrave l& igrave;有可能重塑我们对语言学中假定的抽象句法元素的理解。这个项目的推动力是发现语言中明显的元素。这似乎与世界上（大多数）其他语言中隐藏的元素相对应。对这一现象的调查需要观察和分析这些元素，这些元素是加纳实际使用这种语言的人所使用的，因为这种语言的记录不足。更广泛的影响包括培养论文学生。此外，对于当地的讲者社区，这个项目将帮助当地的教育工作者，为今后编写教材奠定基础，包括一本介绍性语法书。该项目通过加强美国和加纳之间现有的密切关系，特别是教育和科学机构之间的关系，符合国家利益。加纳人民及其多元文化对美国的重要性从1998年以来的三位总统访问加纳的事实中得到了更广泛的证明。人们发现它有几个令人惊讶的特性。最引人注目的发现涉及这样一个事实：某些有争议的抽象元素被认为是英语等语言语法的一部分，但在英语中却很明显，发音也很明显。特别是，英语中某些不定式从句的未发音主语位置被一个元素占据，这个元素尽管未发音，但存在于说话者的心理表征中。这个建议对我们理解支配句子结构的一般规律很重要，但由于它有复杂的后果，一些研究人员提出了先进的理论，省去了未发音的主语位置。在B& ugrave; l& igrave;然而，一些（但有趣的是不是全部）英语中无声主语的位置被显性代词所占据。这个代词的出现似乎支持所有分句都有一个结构主语这一要求的普遍性，但关于其分布细节的假设和对这些假设的检验将表明这一结论是否得到支持。这些发现与“坟墓”有关。有潜力塑造我们对从句（语言的基本组成部分）是如何形成的整个理解。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

It has been estimated that over half the world's roughly seven thousand languages are on the verge of disappearing, while many others face a similar future in the slightly longer term. The loss of a language entails a loss of cultural and intellectual wealth both for its community of speakers and for a scientific community for whom linguistic diversity provides a vital natural laboratory for understanding the nature of human language as a whole. This project investigates unique and scientifically significant sentence structures of a language still spoken by a speech community of reasonable size, but facing clear signs of future threat due to the encroachment of English and larger regional languages: Bùlì (bwu), a Gur (Mabia) language spoken in Sandema, Ghana. In many disciplines, abstract elements are posited but not directly observable, such as quarks in physics. Bùlì has the potential to reshape our understanding of abstract syntactic elements posited in linguistics. The impetus for this project is the discovery of overt elements in the language Bùlì that appear to be the counterpart of elements that are hidden in (most) other languages of the world. The investigation of this phenomenon requires observing and analyzing these elements as used by actual speakers of the language in Ghana, since the language is underdocumented. Broader impacts include the training of a dissertation student. In addition, for the local community of speakers, this project will aid local educators by laying a foundation for the future development of pedagogical materials, including an introductory grammar book. this project falls in the national interest by strengthening the existing close relations between the U.S. and Ghana, especially between educational and scientific institutions. The importance of the Ghanaian people and their diverse cultures to the United States more generally is evidenced by the fact that three presidents since 1998 have visited Ghana This project concerns subordinate clauses in Bùlì, which have been discovered to have several surprising properties. The most striking discovery concerns the fact that certain controversial abstract elements that have been proposed as part of the grammar of languages like English are overt and pronounced in Bùlì. In particular, the unpronounced subject position of certain infinitival clauses in English has been claimed to be occupied by an element that is present in the mental representations of speakers despite being unpronounced. This proposal is important to our understanding of the laws that govern the structure of sentences in general, but because it has complex consequences, some researchers have advanced theories that dispense with unpronounced subject positions. In Bùlì, however, some (but interestingly not all) of the positions for which a silent subject has been posited for English are occupied by an overt pronoun. The presence of this pronoun appears to argue in favor of the universality of a requirement that all clauses have a structural subject, but hypotheses concerning the details of its distribution and testing of these hypotheses will show whether this conclusion is supported or not. These discoveries concerning Bùlì have the potential to shape our entire understanding of how clauses (basic building blocks of language) are formed.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.