Doctoral Dissertation Research: Clauses and Clause Types in Jarai

University Of Texas At Arlington, Arlington TX

Investigators

Abstract

This research project will investigate the grammar of clauses in Jarai, an understudied language spoken by approximately 300,000 inhabitants of Vietnam and Cambodia and a few thousand refugees in the United States. The project will be conducted by Joshua Jensen under the supervision of Dr. Joseph Sabbagh. In studying the grammar of Jarai, Jensen will gather stories from native speakers of the language and will construct new Jarai sentences for Jarai speakers to judge as a way of testing hypotheses about the grammar. Because Jarai communities in Vietnam and Cambodia are largely inaccessible to researchers, Jensen will work with speakers living in the Dallas, TX, and Raleigh, NC, areas. The research will pursue two primary questions. The first question is about the grammatical structure sometimes called the Serial Verb Construction. This is a construction in which a clause has two or more verbs but no coordination or subordination--which in English would look something like "I shot killed the bird" (meaning, "I shot the bird dead"). Why can languages like Jarai make extensive use of Serial Verb Constructions, while languages like English cannot? Answering this question will help linguists better understand not only the grammatical structure of Jarai, but also certain differences between languages. The second question is about word order. In most of the closely-related languages in the Austronesian language family, the verb appears before the subject. Jarai, however, has subject-verb-object word order. What, then, is the underlying relationship between the word order in Jarai and other Austronesian languages? This research also makes an important contribution by adding Jarai language materials to the documentary record. In addition to the linguistic contributions, the project will help preserve Jarai culture among the refugee communities. In collaboration with a Jarai anthropologist, Jensen will make Jarai stories and language materials available on a website for Jarai immigrants and their children.