Linguists know that the word order in our sentences does not necessarily match the order in our brains. For example, in the sentence "What do you see?" the question word "what" parallels the object in the answer: we say "I see a car", so "what" corresponds to the thing that we see. The word "what" appears to start after the verb, but moves to the front of the sentence. This study will examine grammatical constraints on this displacement in languages where the grammatical subject can appear in two different forms depending on whether the verb is intransitive (e.g., "run") or transitive (e.g., "eat"): ergative languages. In most ergative languages, the subject of a transitive cannot displace at all. Linguists do not know why; perhaps it has to do with the difficulty in processing such displacement. To test this, the researchers will use eye-tracking to investigate whether this displacement is particularly difficult in the few ergative languages that can move both kinds of subjects (such languages are about 10% of all ergative languages). Avar, a minority language of the Caucasus, has already been investigated. In this project, they propose to study Niuean, an endangered Polynesian language spoken mainly in New Zealand. The choice of Niuean is critical because its structure is the mirror image of Avar structure and will allow researchers to fill in an important gap in the understanding of ergativity. That in turn will lead to novel ways of modeling the structure of complex sentences and long-distance relations in natural language. If these studies of ergative languages show that speakers pay attention to the notion of grammatical subject, regardless of its form, this would constitute novel confirmation that the abstract notion ?subject? is psychologically real.
Few minority languages have been studied using experimental methods, so this study will set an important precedent for combining experimental methods with field linguistics. The research team will be working with the National Maori Language Institute, with the Faculty of Maori Development (Te Ara Poutama) at Auckland University of Technology, and with colleagues at the University of Auckland. Graduate and undergraduate assistants will be given the opportunity to work on the project and interact with the Niuean community in Auckland and will therefore be exposed to the linguistic and cultural diversity of the Polynesian world.
