Doctoral Dissertation Research: Investigating Overt Definite Articles and Grammatical Variation

Cornell University, Ithaca NY

Investigators

Abstract

The questions "Is the doctor on board?" and "Is a doctor on board?" can signify very different situations. With the first question, a husband may simply be looking for his wife, whereas with the second, a doctor is needed for an emergency. The only difference between these two questions is "the" (the definite article) and "a" (the indefinite article). Many languages, however, do not have overt definite and indefinite articles. How, then, do speakers of these languages differentiate between these two meanings? One way to differentiate is by context: "Is doctor on board?" in languages without overt articles can be either definite or indefinite, and in context speakers understand whether a particular doctor is needed or any doctor. Certain linguistic theories predict that if a language has an overt definite article, then certain grammatical constructions are prohibited. One such prohibited construction is where modifiers appear disconnected from the noun they modify ("Friendly I saw the doctor" is not grammatical in English, but possibly grammatical in languages without definite articles). This project will investigate variation in two dialects of an underdocumented language, each of which have different ways of expressing definiteness. These dialects, while mutually understandable, also differ with respect to possible grammatical constructions, like the disconnected modifier construction. This project will advance our understanding of crosslinguistic variation in how languages express definiteness and keep track of individuals in discourse, research with implications for the fields of natural language processing, speech recognition and other branches of computational linguistics. Broader impacts include a public repository of recordings and transcriptions, materials for use by community members, promotion of linguistic sustainability in the region and collaboration with local university students as active contributors to knowledge on their heritage language. Other outcomes include the training of a doctoral student. The CoPI, a doctoral candidate at Cornell University, will document and analyze two dialects of Ch'ol (CTU), an endangered Mayan language of southern Mexico, for her doctoral dissertation. As the two dialects of Ch'ol (Tila and Tumbala) have different ways to express definiteness, the CoPI will connect this research to theories that predict that certain grammatical constructions are prohibited if a language has a definite article. The Tumbala dialect allows for a variety of modifiers to be disconnected from the nouns they modify. The Tila dialect, however, does not allow many modifiers to appear far away to the noun they modify. The hypothesis of this project is that the Tila dialect has more restrictions than the Tumbala dialect because the Tila dialect has a grammaticalized definite article, whereas the Tumbala dialect does not. During fieldwork, the CoPI will record and transcribe narratives, and conduct interviews with speakers. These varied sources of data will create an empirically sound foundation for the dissertation and future work. The outcomes of this project include in-depth documentation of definite articles and nominal constructions in Ch'ol as well as dialectal variation with respect to definiteness and disconnected nominal expressions, both novel contributions to the field. It will also advance linguistic models at the interface of syntax and semantics and inform work on the marking of definiteness crosslinguistically. 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.