Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Interaction of Transitivity Alternations and Verbal Affix Stacking in a Morphologically Complex Language

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All languages have ways to indicate who did what to whom, and grammatically different strategies offer different perspectives on an event. For example, if Pat is reaching for a cookie, for example, we might expect Pat's mother to say "Pat broke the jar". However, Pat might prefer to say "The jar broke", or even "My sister made me break the jar". In other words, Pat might choose a grammatical strategy that obscures the breaker and the broken object (the two participants in the event) for a reason like avoiding punishment. Such changes in the expression of participants are known as valence alternations. While probably all languages have strategies to manipulate valence, they vary in how they do this: which participants can be added or subtracted, in what conditions, and with what linguistic resources. To achieve the deepest understanding of how this works, linguists must investigate languages which vary significantly from English, including languages which use a greater number of suffixes and prefixes on verbs. This project will contribute to these questions through an exploration of valence alternations in an as yet understudied indigenous South American language, Mocoví, which unlike English displays highly complex verbal morphology. Broader impacts will include the training of community members and undergraduate students in linguistic documentation and description, the creation of community pedagogical resources, and the training of a dissertation student. The corpus will be accessible to scholars and the general public via the Archive of Indigenous Languages of Latin America. More broadly, this work contributes to the scholarship on Argentina's indigenous cultural heritage. By supporting indigenous language maintenance through activities such as the preparation of illustrated booklets for Mocoví primary schools, this project will also continue the strong binational ties between Argentina and the U.S. in the areas of educational and scientific collaboration. In particular, this research will benefit from the close cooperation between the Universidad Nacional del Nordeste (Argentina) and The University of Texas at Austin (U.S.).This project provides an in-depth investigation of valence alternations in the central-northern variety of Mocoví [moc], an underexplored Guaycuruan language spoken in northeastern Argentina. Linguists still have much to understand regarding how the manipulation of participants interacts with other aspects of a language's grammar, and how these resources develop over time. Where in English, speakers tend to add words like "make" to increase valence, languages with complex verbal morphology, like Mocoví, often leverage different resources, such as combinations of verbal affixes. Mocoví's valence-adjusting mechanisms involve the stacking of verbal suffixes according to strategies that are very different from those seen in well-studied European languages. Fieldwork will be carried out by a local team formed by two Mocoví community members and the co-PI, a doctoral student at The University of Texas at Austin, and will create a robust corpus of naturalistic speech across discourse types, together with elicited data focusing on transitivity alternations. The integrated exploration of both types of data allows assessment of possible differences in transitivity-related phenomena across genre, style, etc., among other questions. The corpus will also provide an important data set for further work on Mocoví, including the exploration of dialectal differences and their social and linguistic motivations within this region of intense language contact.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.