Doctoral Dissertation Research: Case Marking and the Left Periphery in Dinka

人类语言既是人类思维的复杂功能，也是使用者群体的重要文化资源。考虑到这两个事实，本项目调查了丁卡语的句子结构，丁卡语是一种未被充分研究的尼罗河语言，具有独特的结构特性，在南苏丹和美国越来越多的移民社区中使用。美国的许多难民社区在保存和传播母语方面面临困难，特别是在描述该语言的出版资源很少的情况下。Coppe van Urk先生将与波士顿侨民社区合作，提供深入的语言文档和分析，这些文档和分析将提供给社区。此外，这项研究将制作一本丁卡儿童故事集，作为难民社区的资源。同时，这个项目将研究Dinka语法的一系列方面，这些方面挑战了目前关于所有语言都通用的特征的观点。特别地，这项研究着眼于“远距离依赖”（疑问句和类似结构）的语法，以及它们与格和一致的相互作用。大多数句法结构理论认为，远距离依赖的语法完全不同于控制格标记和动词一致的过程，这反映了经过充分研究的语言的事实。然而，在Dinka中，远距离依赖关系与大小写标记和一致性的变化密切相关，这表明这种分离并不是普遍存在的。因此，对丁卡语的研究有望推进和改变我们对人类语言几个基本方面的看法。

Human language is simultaneously a complex function of the human mind and a vital cultural resource for communities of speakers. With both of these facts in mind, this project investigates the sentence structure of Dinka, an understudied Nilotic language with unique structural properties, spoken in South Sudan and in a growing diaspora community in the US. Many refugee communities in the US face difficulties in preserving and transmitting their native language, particularly when there are few published resources describing the language. Working with the Boston diaspora community, Mr. Coppe van Urk will provide in-depth documentation and analysis of the language, which will be made available to the community. In addition, this study will produce a collection of Dinka children's stories as a resource for the refugee community. At the same time, this project will investigate an array of aspects of Dinka grammar that challenge current ideas about features usually thought to be common to all languages. In particular, this research looks at the syntax of "long-distance dependencies" (questions and similar constructions) and their interaction with case and agreement. Most theories of syntactic structure view the grammar of long-distance dependencies as entirely distinct from the processes that govern case marking and verb agreement, reflecting the facts of well-studied languages. In Dinka, however, long-distance dependencies go hand in hand with changes in case marking and agreement, suggesting that this separation is not universal. Research on Dinka thus promises to advance and change our view of several fundamental aspects of human language.