Doctoral Dissertation Research: Ergativity in an Endangered Language

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Languages have vastly different ways of marking grammatical relations like subject and object, including differences in word order, marking on nouns and verbs, and employing different sentence structures altogether. The goal of this project is to investigate how grammatical relations can differ across languages and change over time, with a particular focus on an endangered language. By recording sentences, stories, and conversations with speakers, this project will document and analyze an unusual system of grammatical marking, which is undergoing rapid change due to contact with other languages. The resulting language documentation will be useful not only to linguists, but also to community members interested in maintaining the language.The language being investigated shows an ergative alignment, where transitive subjects are treated differently from intransitive subjects and transitive objects; unlike many ergative languages, however, this pattern is only apparent in the formation of relative clauses, not from word order or marking on nouns and verbs. This pattern was previously thought to be impossible and presents some challenges for recent work in theoretical syntax. This research will explore the properties of this unusual pattern and its implications for our understanding of clause structure more broadly, including how clause structure is affected by language contact. To address this question, the study will be based on interviews with a broad sample of speakers, whose language use may differ according to age, education, and place of residence.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.