Descriptive and Theoretical Studies in Selayarese Syntax The aim of this project is to collect data on the syntax of Selayarese, an Austronesian language from Selayar Island, Indonesia, and to consider the data in the wider comparative context of a theory of Universal Grammar. The primary topics to be investigated are: the effects of verbal morphology on syntactic structure, word order and agreement, wh-questions, relative clauses and other nominal structure, further aspects of sentential complementation, and the distribution of the "peripatetic" (Friberg 1992) absolutive marker. The project will make available new information on the syntax of a little known language, and should lead to a greater understanding of the organization of several modules of Universal Grammar and the ways in which they can be parameterized to partially define the grammars of individual languages.
