Doctoral Dissertation Research: Prefixal Agreement, Verb Classes, and Serialization

Harvard University, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

This dissertation project focuses on the detailed documentation and study of an under-studied language with rapidly decreasing intergenerational transmission. The language displays a number of structural characteristics which are relatively unique within its language family; deeper investigation into the origin of morphological agreement and verb classes has the potential to shed light on broader issues within theoretical linguistics such as the underlying representation of lexical items, while also furthering our understanding of the ways in which languages change and develop over time. In addition, this project aims to provide a solid empirical foundation for future research into variation across related languages, contributing to our knowledge of typological patterns found in and around the region. Finally, it is a goal of the project that the resulting data, processed in close collaboration with native speaker consultants and publicly archived, will be multifunctional and suitable for adaptation into community-facing literary, pedagogical, and reference material, facilitating local efforts at language maintenance and preservation. The researcher will conduct on-site fieldwork with native speakers in order to thoroughly document and analyze grammatical structure with particular focus on the language's morphological systems and their interface with other syntactic and phonological phenomena from both a synchronic and diachronic perspective. In particular, this project is built around the hypothesis that there is a developing incipient inflection class system, wherein the choice of prefix shape with a particular set of verbs is no longer phonologically or semantically predictable. By closely investigating sub-systemic alternations in verb class, valency, voice, and serialization, this project aims to shed light on issues such as i) the structural status and historical origin of subject agreement and semi-idiosyncratic verb classes; ii) the distribution of pronominal elements and their intersection with the development of case and alignment; and iii) the grammaticalization of valency- and category-changing derivational morphology and their relationship to the abstract representation of lexical items. Thus, this work has the potential to contribute to our broader understanding of morphosyntactic theory cross-linguistically, while also bringing a novel diachronic perspective to the study of an understudied language family. 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.