Human language is simultaneously a complex function of the human mind and a vital cultural resource for communities of speakers. With both of these facts in mind, this project investigates the sentence structure of Dinka, an understudied Nilotic language with unique structural properties, spoken in South Sudan and in a growing diaspora community in the US. Many refugee communities in the US face difficulties in preserving and transmitting their native language, particularly when there are few published resources describing the language. Working with the Boston diaspora community, Mr. Coppe van Urk will provide in-depth documentation and analysis of the language, which will be made available to the community. In addition, this study will produce a collection of Dinka children's stories as a resource for the refugee community.
At the same time, this project will investigate an array of aspects of Dinka grammar that challenge current ideas about features usually thought to be common to all languages. In particular, this research looks at the syntax of "long-distance dependencies" (questions and similar constructions) and their interaction with case and agreement. Most theories of syntactic structure view the grammar of long-distance dependencies as entirely distinct from the processes that govern case marking and verb agreement, reflecting the facts of well-studied languages. In Dinka, however, long-distance dependencies go hand in hand with changes in case marking and agreement, suggesting that this separation is not universal. Research on Dinka thus promises to advance and change our view of several fundamental aspects of human language.
