Investigating variation and change: Case in diachrony

这个项目试图调查两个相互关联的话题：语言或方言是如何相互变化的，以及它们为什么和如何随着时间的推移而变化。经验焦点将是希腊语，特别是格现象，即句法角色的形态表达，如主语和宾语(参见英语句子中主语和宾语的对比)。这项研究将通过考察希腊语2800年的历史来实现其广度，但它也旨在具有深度，通过聚焦于一种语言系统，并考察一种语言系统内大小写与其他语言现象的相互关系。从理论上讲，这个项目是在原则和参数(Chomsky，1957)的理论框架内提出的，该框架一直专注于两个问题：(A)语言的普遍原则是什么；所有语言都有共同的原则，因此是人类大脑固有的；(B)哪些属性是语言特有的；导致语言外观的差异，因此容易发生变化？格及其与形式句法的联系一直处于语言理论研究的前沿，因为它既具有普遍属性，也具有语言特有的属性。一方面，格词法并不是在所有语言中都有，甚至在有格词法的语言中也不存在，这种变化似乎抵制任何普遍的刻画；但另一方面，主流语言理论试图证明名词的格词法形式与其在句子中的句法作用之间存在更深层次的联系，即格词法在某种程度上允许名词性从句和特定的格格值(主格、宾格等)的存在。链接到不同的角色(主体、客体等)。然而，格和句法角色之间的关系显然不是一对一的，最近有人试图重新配置格在语法中的位置，并将其视为一个参数，语言之间的一个变异点(Baker 2015)。这种方法既新颖又有理论意义，因为它使用了参数的概念来解释格实现领域中的跨语言差异。我们的目标是通过关注宾语和天才来测试这一提议的有效性，这两种情况的性质一直是出了名的难以确定。为了研究与格和与格，我们关注了两个现象，其中角色和格之间简单的一对一的观点完全被打破了：与格和格宾语的单及物谓词和双及物谓词的与格宾语和所有格宾语，以及与格被认为是“古怪”主语的环境，像‘似乎’这样的“非人称”动词的论点也与主格共存。我们将考察这些环境的历时，因为至关重要的是：(A)形态与格从希腊语历史上消失了；(B)在希腊语近代史上，间接宾语的形态实现在标准现代希腊语和北希腊语之间出现了分裂。我们将采用两种方法来解决研究问题：(A)从荷马到现代希腊语的代表性文本语料库收集数据；(B)从北希腊语收集新的数据，重点关注与钝化有关的单音和双及物词的非主题宾语的行为。该项目的交付成果将包括学术出版物，但也包括一个在线可搜索和带注释的树库，供任何对CASE或希腊语感兴趣的研究人员自由使用，以及一个项目网站。这项研究的影响将通过以下方式展示：(A)关于两面主义的好处和语言死亡威胁的视频；(B)关于希腊语历史的视频；(D)关于语言教学中理论语言学研究的相关性的视频；(E)向不同类型的第二语言学习者教授案例类别的两个教学计划。

This project seeks to investigate two interrelated topics: how languages or dialects vary from each other, and why and how they change in the course of time. The empirical focus will be Greek, and in particular the phenomenon of case, i.e. the morphological expression of syntactic roles such as subject and object (see the contrast between the subject and the object in an English sentence like "He saw him"). This investigation will achieve its breadth by looking into case across 2800 years of history of Greek but it also aims to have depth, by focusing on one language system and looking into the interrelation of case with other linguistic phenomena within the system of one language. Theoretically, the project is couched within the theoretical framework of Principles and Parameters (Chomsky 1957) that has been focusing on two questions:(a) What are the universal principles of language; shared by all languages and therefore inherent in the human brain?(b) Which properties are language-specific; contributing to differences in the way languages look and therefore prone to variation?Case and its link to formal syntax has been at the forefront of linguistic theorizing exactly because it has both universal and language-specific properties. On the one hand, case morphology is not found in all languages and even in the languages that have it exhibits fascinating cross-linguistic variation that seems to resist any universal characterization; on the other hand however, mainstream linguistic theory has tried to argue for a deeper link between the case form of a noun and its syntactic role in a sentence, namely that case morphology in a way "licenses" the presence of a nominal in a clause and specific case values (nominative, accusative etc.) are linked to different roles (subject, object etc.). The relationship between cases and syntactic roles however is clearly not 'one-to-one' and recently there have been attempts to reconfigure the place of case in grammar and treat it as a parameter, a point of variation among languages (Baker 2015). Such an approach is both novel and theoretically significant because it uses the notion of parameters, to account for the cross-linguistic variation in the domain of case realization. We aim to test the validity of this proposal by focusing on datives and genitives, two cases whose nature has been notoriously hard to pin down. To investigate datives and genitives, we focus on two phenomena where the simple 'one-to-one' view between roles and cases breaks down entirely: dative and genitive objects of monotransitive and ditransitive predicates, and environments where datives are considered "quirky" subjects, arguments of "impersonal" verbs like 'seems' that also coexist with nominatives. We will look into the diachrony of these environments because crucially:(a) morphological dative case has been lost from the history of Greek;(b) in the recent history of Greek, there has been a split in the morphological realization of indirect objects, between Standard Modern Greek and Northern Greek. The methods that we will employ to address the research questions are two-fold: (a) collecting data from a corpus of representative texts from Homer to Modern Greek; (b) collecting novel data from Northern Greek focusing on the behaviour of non-theme objects of both mono and ditransitives in relation to passivization.The deliverables of this project will include academic publications but also an online searchable and annotated treebank, to be used freely by any researcher interested in case or Greek, and also a project website. The impact of this research will be showcased through (a) videos on the benefits of bi-dilectalism and the threat of language death; (b) videos about the history of the Greek language; (d) videos about the relevance of theoretical linguistic research in language teaching; (e) two teaching plans for teaching the category of case to different types of second language learners.