ABSTRACT The dissertation student will spend two months in Belgium in order to collect data on nominal structure in Walloon, a Belgian Romance language. The results of this investigation will form an essential component of a doctoral thesis concerning the comparative syntax of nominal structure across Romance languages. Data will be collected primarily by interviewing and recording native Walloon speakers living in the region of the Ardennes, as well as by consulting local scholars in Louvain-la-Neuve and Liege and examining texts in university and public libraries. The syntactic phenomena to be investigated include adjective placement, nominal agreement patterns, clitic constructions, and possessive pronouns. The proposed activity will be facilitated by the collaboration of Professor Michel Francard, a Walloon dialectologist at the Universite Catholique de Louvain. The significance of this project is twofold: Firstly, as preliminary dissertation research has shown, unexpected syntactic patterns of Walloon noun phrases shed light on an array of phenomena that have eluded adequate explanation in recent work on comparative Romance syntax. In addition, this research undertaking will provide the important opportunity to gather and analyze syntactic data from this moribund language that, until recently, has been studied only descriptively.
