Doctoral Dissertation Research: Argument Licensing and Agreement

人类语言的哪些特性是通用的，哪些在不同的语言中可能有所不同？回答这些问题将有助于我们理解人类独特的语言能力，通过这种能力，我们希望能够深入了解人类思维的整体结构。本论文项目旨在通过仔细调查在祖鲁语中发现的几个相互关联的语言现象来进一步实现这一目标，祖鲁语是南非使用的一种未被充分研究的班图语。麻省理工学院的博士生克莱尔·哈尔珀特将在大卫·佩塞茨基和诺文·理查兹的指导下，与南非和美国的演讲者一起，对祖鲁语的句子结构进行语言学田野调查。她的研究重点是控制语言中口头一致的复杂过程的因素。尽管祖鲁语中的动词几乎总是与它们的主语保持一致，但某些结构（包括一些带有特殊的动词-主语词序的结构，以及一些名词缺少“增强”的结构）以独特的方式破坏了这种一致关系。通过检查这些结构，本研究将促进我们对动词和名词之间的连接以及名词在特定语法位置上“被许可”出现的方式的理解。虽然大约有1000万人使用祖鲁语，并且包含多种方言，但语言中的许多方言差异仍然没有记录。哈尔珀特的田野调查将开始纠正这种情况，记录祖鲁语语法结构的几个关键方面的方言变化，从而允许对语言变化更广泛地进行更细致的理解。该项目将在祖鲁语经历快速变化的时期记录祖鲁语的多种变体，在可能不会持续很长时间的阶段捕捉语言。这个博士论文研究进步奖将提供支持，使有前途的学生建立一个强大的独立研究事业。

Which properties of human language are universal, and which may vary across languages? Answering these questions will help us understand the unique human capacity for language, through which we hope to gain insight into the overall architecture of the human mind. This dissertation project aims to further this goal through a careful investigation of several interrelated linguistic phenomena found in Zulu, an understudied Bantu language spoken in South Africa. MIT doctoral student Claire Halpert, under the supervision of David Pesetsky and Norvin Richards, will conduct linguistic fieldwork on the sentence-structure of Zulu, working with speakers in South Africa and the US. Her study focuses on the factors that govern the complex process of verbal agreement in the language. Though verbs in Zulu nearly always agree with their subjects, certain constructions (including some with special verb-subject word order and others in which a noun lacks an otherwise characteristic "augment") disrupt this agreement relation in unique ways. By examining these constructions, this investigation will advance our understanding of the connectons between verbs and nouns and the ways in which nouns are "licensed" to appear in particular grammatical positions.Although Zulu is spoken by roughly 10 million people and encompasses multiple dialects, numerous dialect differences within the language remain undocumented. Halpert's fieldwork will begin to remedy this situation, documenting dialectal variation in several key aspects of Zulu grammatical structure, and will thus allow for more a fine-grained understanding of linguistic variation more generally. The project will document multiple varieties of Zulu at a time when the language is undergoing rapid change, capturing the language at a stage that may not persist for long. This Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career.