Doctoral Dissertation Research: Clause linkage in a comparative perspective

This doctoral dissertation project documents and analyzes a language with a complex system of clause-linkage. Defying the traditional notion of the “sentence,” languages of this type can combine several predicates together in a single chain. Use of complex clause-linkage raises scientifically important questions regarding how humans package and interpret information. Closer examination of data from the research language, and incorporation of comparative data from some of its sister languages, enriches a scientific understanding of how clause-linking devices work and how this type of linguistic complexity may arise. Broader impacts of the project include workforce development and educational opportunities for individuals who are involved in the language documentation and linguistic analysis aspects of the project. All data are deposited in an established archive and made publicly accessible. This project generates a grammatical description of a language that shows evidence of recent syntactic change in several of its clause-linking devices. This language employs systems of clause-chaining and switch reference, while also making use of serial verb constructions and coordination of fully finite clauses. Along with the synchronic description, this doctoral dissertation project includes diachronic analysis of how these clause-linking devices arose, which advances a better understanding of their full range of functions and supports a better understanding of how syntactic change occurs in clause-chaining systems. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.