Collaborative Research: Variation in Control Structures

在美国国家科学基金会的支持下，Maria Polinsky和Eric Potsdam将对具有特定句法结构的句子中冗余信息的省略进行为期两年的语言学研究。在带有“try”和“intention”等谓语的句子中，try /intention的主语与描述预期事件的句子的主语是相同的。这样的同一性称为控制关系。这个研究项目将系统地记录自然语言实现控制关系的方式，这是以前没有做过的事情。该项目还包括开发一个世界语言中具有代表性的控制模式数据库。研究小组将对三种很少被描述的语言进行实地考察：马达加斯加语（马达加斯加语）和Rutul和Tsaxur语（东北高加索达吉斯坦语）。实证研究结果将为句法理论提供信息，句法理论应该受到约束，以便允许和模拟所有且仅是观察到的控制结构范围。这项研究将加强对几种文献不足的语言的学术理解，并通过激励修改来解释控制结构，从而推进语言学理论。该项目还将通过加州大学圣地亚哥分校和佛罗里达大学的独特合作，让研究生和本科生参与其中，为未来的研究人员提供培训。最后，该项目将有助于在美国的语言学家与马达加斯加和达吉斯坦的语言学家之间建立联系，该项目的实地工作将在这两个国家进行。

With National Science Foundation support, Drs. Maria Polinsky and Eric Potsdam will conduct two years of linguistic research on the omission of redundant information in sentences with a particular syntactic structure. In sentences with predicates such as 'try' and 'intend', the subject of trying/intention is identical to the subject of the sentence describing the intended event. Such identity is called a Control relation. This research project will systematically document the ways that natural languages realize the Control relation, something that has not been done before. The project also includes the development of a database of representative Control patterns in the world's languages. The research team will conduct fieldwork on three little-described languages: Malagasy (spoken in Madagascar) and Rutul and Tsaxur (spoken in Dagestan, NE Caucasus). The empirical findings will inform syntactic theory, which should be constrained so as to permit and model all and only the observed range of Control structures.This research will enhance scholarly understanding of several under-documented languages and advance linguistic theory by motivating modifications to account for Control structures. The project will also provide training for future researchers by involving graduate and undergraduate students in a unique collaboration between the University of California in San Diego and the University of Florida. Finally, the project will serve to establish contacts between linguists in the United States and linguists in Madagascar and Dagestan, where fieldwork for the project will be conducted.