Doctoral Dissertation Research: Non-verbal predication and the syntax of information structure in Wolof

University Of Chicago, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

Information structure concerns the way in which information is packaged within utterances. A longstanding question in linguistics investigates the ways in which information-structural properties, such as informational focus and topic, are related to grammatical functions such as subject and predicate. There is evidence that a particular information-structural factor triggers a certain syntactic structure in some cases, but not in others, and vice versa. A particularly fruitful area of research of this topic are copular sentences, in which the main predicate is some category other than a verb: an adjective, a noun, etc. (e.g. "a student" in "John is a student"). A lot of previous research focuses precisely on their information structure, often claiming that some types of copular sentences have a fixed information structure, while others do not. However, those investigations are mostly based on observations about English and a few other Indo-European languages, which do not show overt marking of information-structural properties of utterances. The current project expands this research to include the Niger-Congo language Wolof, which uses a variety of morphosyntactic means to mark the information structure of its sentences, and is thus particularly suitable for investigating the question at hand. Under the direction of Dr. Karlos Arregi, Ms. Martina Martinovic will conduct fieldwork to investigate two Wolof copular constructions, each corresponding to a different information-structural profile. Preliminary data show that their classification does not match the typology of copular clauses that has been assumed so far based on other languages. This project follows a growing trend of research which uses data from understudied languages to inform linguistic theory. It will employ a variety of field methodologies, especially focusing on the elicitation of target sentences embedded in a natural language context. The findings on Wolof will be related to cross-linguistic generalizations, theoretical questions, and the implications for the typology of copular sentences and the universality of their properties.