Doctoral Dissertation Research: Investigating the Universality of the Subject Requirement through a Language With Overt Correspondents for Postulated Null Subjects

Massachusetts Institute Of Technology, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

It has been estimated that over half the world's roughly seven thousand languages are on the verge of disappearing, while many others face a similar future in the slightly longer term. The loss of a language entails a loss of cultural and intellectual wealth both for its community of speakers and for a scientific community for whom linguistic diversity provides a vital natural laboratory for understanding the nature of human language as a whole. This project investigates unique and scientifically significant sentence structures of a language still spoken by a speech community of reasonable size, but facing clear signs of future threat due to the encroachment of English and larger regional languages: Bùlì (bwu), a Gur (Mabia) language spoken in Sandema, Ghana. In many disciplines, abstract elements are posited but not directly observable, such as quarks in physics. Bùlì has the potential to reshape our understanding of abstract syntactic elements posited in linguistics. The impetus for this project is the discovery of overt elements in the language Bùlì that appear to be the counterpart of elements that are hidden in (most) other languages of the world. The investigation of this phenomenon requires observing and analyzing these elements as used by actual speakers of the language in Ghana, since the language is underdocumented. Broader impacts include the training of a dissertation student. In addition, for the local community of speakers, this project will aid local educators by laying a foundation for the future development of pedagogical materials, including an introductory grammar book. this project falls in the national interest by strengthening the existing close relations between the U.S. and Ghana, especially between educational and scientific institutions. The importance of the Ghanaian people and their diverse cultures to the United States more generally is evidenced by the fact that three presidents since 1998 have visited Ghana This project concerns subordinate clauses in Bùlì, which have been discovered to have several surprising properties. The most striking discovery concerns the fact that certain controversial abstract elements that have been proposed as part of the grammar of languages like English are overt and pronounced in Bùlì. In particular, the unpronounced subject position of certain infinitival clauses in English has been claimed to be occupied by an element that is present in the mental representations of speakers despite being unpronounced. This proposal is important to our understanding of the laws that govern the structure of sentences in general, but because it has complex consequences, some researchers have advanced theories that dispense with unpronounced subject positions. In Bùlì, however, some (but interestingly not all) of the positions for which a silent subject has been posited for English are occupied by an overt pronoun. The presence of this pronoun appears to argue in favor of the universality of a requirement that all clauses have a structural subject, but hypotheses concerning the details of its distribution and testing of these hypotheses will show whether this conclusion is supported or not. These discoveries concerning Bùlì have the potential to shape our entire understanding of how clauses (basic building blocks of language) are formed. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.