With National Science Foundation support, Drs. Paul Portner and Raffaella Zanuttini will conduct two years of research on clause types in human language. This research seeks to understand what gives a sentence a particular function, for example that of asking a question, making a statement, or giving an order. In particular, the project aims to answer two questions: (1) To what extent can a sentence's function be read off of its grammatical form? (2) What range of functions are mapped to particular grammatical forms in the languages of the world? The study will focus on two languages, Korean and Badiotto (a Romance variety spoken in northern Italy). The data for this project will come from several sources: fieldwork, questionnaires, elicited production data, and grammaticality judgments.
This project has significance for several scientific fields that pertain to language (e.g. computational linguistics, psycholinguistics, and language acquisition). The results of this research will fill a major gap in our understanding of language, both in terms of the grammars of particular languages and of language universals. Additionally, there are benefits to documenting and studying Badiotto and Korean: Badiotto is an endangered language variety. Korean is one of the world's major languages, and yet its particles and clause types are not well studied. Finally, this project will train young scholars in the analysis and description of lesser-known languages, a skill of importance in educational institutions, government agencies concerned with intelligence and defense, and the computational linguistics industry.
