This research project will investigate the grammar of clauses in Jarai, an understudied language spoken by approximately 300,000 inhabitants of Vietnam and Cambodia and a few thousand refugees in the United States. The project will be conducted by Joshua Jensen under the supervision of Dr. Joseph Sabbagh. In studying the grammar of Jarai, Jensen will gather stories from native speakers of the language and will construct new Jarai sentences for Jarai speakers to judge as a way of testing hypotheses about the grammar. Because Jarai communities in Vietnam and Cambodia are largely inaccessible to researchers, Jensen will work with speakers living in the Dallas, TX, and Raleigh, NC, areas.
The research will pursue two primary questions. The first question is about the grammatical structure sometimes called the Serial Verb Construction. This is a construction in which a clause has two or more verbs but no coordination or subordination--which in English would look something like "I shot killed the bird" (meaning, "I shot the bird dead"). Why can languages like Jarai make extensive use of Serial Verb Constructions, while languages like English cannot? Answering this question will help linguists better understand not only the grammatical structure of Jarai, but also certain differences between languages. The second question is about word order. In most of the closely-related languages in the Austronesian language family, the verb appears before the subject. Jarai, however, has subject-verb-object word order. What, then, is the underlying relationship between the word order in Jarai and other Austronesian languages?
This research also makes an important contribution by adding Jarai language materials to the documentary record. In addition to the linguistic contributions, the project will help preserve Jarai culture among the refugee communities. In collaboration with a Jarai anthropologist, Jensen will make Jarai stories and language materials available on a website for Jarai immigrants and their children.
This award funded research on the Jarai language, spoken by a Montagnard tribe in Vietnam. The goal of the research was to provide a detailed analysis of major grammatical features in Jarai. The resulting dissertation, defended on March 29, 2013, constitutes the first monograph-length work devoted to Jarai syntax. The dissertation covers the Jarai noun phrase and clause, with a focus on the the verb phrase and grammatical auxilliaries and particles. The analysis of serial verb constructions (SVCs), which constitutes a significant portion of the chapter on the verb phrase, concludes that Jarai SVCs involve a light verb (the first verb functions almost like an auxilliary) which embeds a full verb phrase headed by the second verb. A major theoretical issue in the study of SVCs is the status of direct objects that are shared by two verbs: is that sharing actually a feature of the syntax? Jarai furnishes evidence that the apparently shared object is syntactically associated only with the second verb. The first verb does not take an object (because of its grammatical position), and it is even possible to construct SVCs where the single object cannot be interpreted as an object of the first verb. The analysis of the operator domain (the part of the clause where we find grammatical particles and wh-movement) supports an articulated structure involving at least a Force head, Focus head, and Finiteness head. In particular, the evidence points to Force being occupied by a question particle, which requires a phrase to move into its specifier, often leading to clause-final placement of the question particle. Displacement of ?wh?-constituents is shown to be subject to the same restrictions as focus-movement; thus, both ?wh?-movement and focus-movement are analyzed as targeting a position associated with Focus (Spec,Foc). Jarai also exhibits a ?wh?-pseudocleft structure, which can also involve movement of the ?wh?-phrase to Spec,Foc. The analysis of the noun phrase contends that demonstrative-final word order results from movement of the Number phrase into the specifier of a null definite Determiner. Scope facts indicate that possessors merge low in the noun phrase, in Spec,nP. The full picture is very much in line with Cartographic approaches to the DP. After the dissertation was defended, it was submitted for publication, and it is currently under review. Results from this research were presented in peer-reviewed academic talks, including one at the annual meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association. This research also led to the submission of an article on verb phrase semantics (currently under review with a peer-reviewed journal).
