With National Science Foundation support, Michael Diercks and Paul Portner are conducting research on the syntax (i.e. sentence structure) of Bukusu, a Bantu language spoken in western Kenya. This research focuses on the several interesting properties of subjects in Bukusu (as opposed to non-subjects such as objects, or indirect objects). In English, for example, a question about an object uses the word 'do': "Who do you like?" A question about a subject, however, does not use 'do': "Who likes you?" The job of the linguist is to identify what causes asymmetries like these, and why they exist in human language. The Bukusu language is helpful to this end, as it has a number of prefixes related to subjecthood which are typologically rare, and looking at the properties of these prefixes helps illuminate the properties of subjecthood. In addition, a number of sentence types which use these prefixes are problematic for existing linguistic theory, making them an interesting topic of investigation. In this way this project has a dual purpose: to discover new language data from the Bukusu language, and to explore how those data contribute to the theory of the human faculty of language.
