Doctoral Dissertation Research: Questions and answers in K'iche'

Ohio State University, The, Columbus OH

Investigators

Abstract

Each human language is a complex system and the languages that are still spoken today exhibit a wide variety of complex structures. By examining linguistic properties of human languages, e.g., sentence structure and meaning, linguists discover fundamental properties common to all human languages. At the same time, linguistic research reveals the diversity of language and systematic explorations of a wide variety of languages are indispensable to understanding this diversity. Yet, most research in formal linguistics focuses on English and other well-studied European languages. While theoretical research on under-studied languages has been on the rise in the past 30 years, formal linguistic research on many topics is still hampered by very little data from a diverse range of languages being available. Such research thus leaves unaddressed questions about cross-linguistic universals and variation. Hence, additional theoretically well-informed studies in under-studied languages are needed in order to broaden our knowledge about human languages and to develop theories that can explain a wide range of facts about them. This project studies K'iche', an indigenous Mayan language of Guatemala, with the goal of exploring a central topic in the formal study of linguistic meaning, namely the interpretation of questions and answers. While there are some preliminary studies on this topic in K'iche', there is no in-depth study that looks at how different kinds of questions and their answers are expressed in this language. Thus, the research will contribute to the understanding of K'iche' grammar by significantly extending the limited previous work in these areas and at the same time facilitating an informed comparison between K'iche' and well-studied languages like English. To that end, a large component of the grant work involves collecting original linguistic data in Guatemala from native speakers of K'iche'. In addition, the research involves developing an analysis of the question-answer exchange in K'iche' in a mathematically precise theory of grammar with the goal of excelling not only in empirical breadth and but also in theoretical rigor. The project aims to explore whether theoretical models of questions and answers can account for the structure and interpretation of questions and answers in a typologically different language like K'iche'. For example, K'iche' differs from English in terms of having a "canonical" verb-initial word order and allowing word order changes based on discourse-related phenomena. Existing formal theories of discourse and of the question-answer exchange are predominantly modeled based on data from English. Thus, this research aims to bring theoretically interesting data from K'iche' to bear on the broader issue of modeling the grammar of questions and answers.