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，有一半以上正处于消失的边缘，而其他许多语言在稍长一点的时间内也面临着类似的未来。一种语言的丧失对其说话者群体和科学界来说都是一种文化和智力财富的损失，对科学界来说，语言多样性为理解整个人类语言的性质提供了一个至关重要的天然实验室。这个项目调查了一种语言的独特的和具有科学意义的句子结构，这种语言仍然被一个规模合理的语言社区使用，但由于英语和更大的地区语言的侵蚀，面临着未来威胁的明显迹象：加纳桑德马的古尔语(马比亚语)，B&amp；uGrave；L和iGrave；在许多学科中，抽象元素是假定的，但不能直接观察到，例如物理学中的夸克。L有可能重塑我们对语言学中抽象句法成分的理解。这个项目的推动力是发现了语言中的显性元素，这些元素似乎与世界上(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加纳实际讲这种语言的人所使用的这些要素，因为这种语言的记录很少。更广泛的影响包括对一名论文学生的培训。此外，对于当地讲话者社区，该项目将帮助当地教育工作者，为今后编写教学材料奠定基础，包括编写一本入门语法书。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以下事实得到了证明：自1998年以来，已有三位总统访问了加纳这个项目涉及L法案中的从属条款，这些条款被发现具有几个令人惊讶的特性。最引人注目的发现是，某些有争议的抽象成分被提出作为英语等语言语法的一部分，但它们在B&amp；uGrave；L和iGrave；中是公开的，发音也是如此。特别是，英语中某些不定式从句的不发音主语位置被一种存在于说话人的心理表征中的成分所占据，尽管该成分并不发音。这一建议对我们理解支配句子结构的一般规律很重要，但由于它具有复杂的后果，一些研究人员提出了省略未发音的主语位置的理论。然而，在《L》一书中，英语中一些(但有趣的是并非全部)无声主语的位置被显性代词占据。这个代词的出现似乎支持所有从句都有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。这些关于L的发现有可能改变我们对从句(语言的基本组成部分)是如何形成的整体理解。这一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智力优势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.