Doctoral Dissertation Research: Pronominals and Verb Agreement in Inuktitut

理论语言学中的一个中心问题是语言变异的范围(语言的差异在多大程度上)和语言的共性(语言在抽象层面上在多大程度上是基本相同的，尽管表面上有差异)。回答这个问题既需要对特定语言的详细调查，也需要更广泛的跨语言比较。该项目将调查北美一种土著语言的句子结构和单词结构。美洲的许多土著语言记录不足；对于本研究的目标语言的方言，更缺乏对个别方言群体的语言特性的详细研究。具体地说，该项目将全面描述和分析代词和类似代词的口头同意形式的结构特性，并将研究结果与已知的相关和基因无关语言进行比较。这些文件将构成COPI撰写的博士论文中分析的核心材料。更广泛的影响包括将录音和抄本公开存放在位于费尔班克斯的阿拉斯加大学阿拉斯加土著语言档案馆，以及对从事翻译和语言教学工作的土著社区成员进行语言培训。反过来，这将有助于促进针对方言的语言学习材料，从而有助于语言可持续性方面的工作。这名Copi是麻省理工学院的博士生，他将记录和分析加拿大东部的因努基特人，这是加拿大北极地区努纳武特地区所说的一组因纽特语言之一，与阿拉斯加所说的爱斯基摩-阿留申语言有关。因此，该项目的工作将为今后关于因努基特人和因纽特人的语言学研究以及更广泛的理论语言学领域奠定坚实的经验基础。这个项目的主要假设是，在因努基特中编码及物宾语的动词约定标记不是规范的约定标记，而是与宾语共同出现的、类似代词的“双重标记”。从历史上看，对这些元素的语言学研究主要集中在欧洲语言上；然而，对因努基特人来说，这种方法的证据来自于与这些研究较好的语言在分布和结构上的惊人相似。这个项目将调查这些派别如何与因努基特人的大小写系统作为一个整体进行互动，并展示他们在其他因纽特语言中的缺失如何产生一个略有不同的大小写系统，尽管表面上看起来是这样。因此，格形态在因纽特语言中的分布差异与动词协议形式的基本结构密切相关。这个项目还将探索如何将这种新的方法扩展到解释因努基特语中其他与代词相关的现象，以及跨语言的格系统。

A central question in theoretical linguistics concerns the range of linguistic variation (to what extent languages differ) and language universals (to what extent languages are fundamentally the same at an abstract level, despite surface variation). Answering this question requires both detailed investigation of particular languages and broader cross-linguistic comparison. This project will investigate sentence structure and word structure in an indigenous language of North America. Many of the indigenous languages of the Americas are under-documented; detailed research into the linguistic properties of individual dialect groups is even more lacking for the dialects of the language targeted in this study. Specifically, the project will provide a comprehensive description and analysis of the structural properties of pronouns and pronoun-like verbal agreement forms and will compare the findings with what is already known about related and genetically unrelated languages. The documentation will form the core material analyzed in a doctoral dissertation produced by the CoPI. Broader impacts include a publicly available deposit of the recordings and transcriptions at the Alaska Native Language Archive at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, as well as the linguistic training of indigenous community members working on translation and language pedagogy. This, in turn, will aid the facilitation of dialect-specific language learning materials and thus contribute towards work in language sustainability. The CoPI, a doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology, will document and analyze Eastern Canadian Inuktitut, one of a group of Inuit languages spoken in the Canadian Arctic territory of Nunavut, and which are related to Eskimo-Aleut languages spoken in Alaska. The work produced in this project will therefore build a solid empirical foundation for future linguistic research on Inuktitut and Inuit, as well as for the field of theoretical linguistics more broadly. The main hypothesis of this project is that the verbal agreement markers that encode transitive objects in Inuktitut are not canonical agreement markers, but rather "doubled clitics," pronoun-like elements that co-occur with objects. Historically, linguistic research on these elements has focused on European languages; however, evidence for such an approach for Inuktitut comes from striking distributional and structural parallels with these better-studied languages. This project will investigate how these clitics interact with the case system of Inuktitut as a whole, and show how their absence in other Inuit languages yields a slightly different case system, despite surface appearances. Variation in the distribution of case morphology across the Inuit languages is therefore tightly linked to the underlying structure of the verbal agreement forms. This project will also explore how this novel approach may be extended to account for other pronoun-related phenomena in Inuktitut, as well as case systems cross-linguistically.