About the project
Language is what makes us human, and all humans have language. But are all human languages fundamentally the same, or can they be organised in very different ways? Does our shared ability to use language come from a specialised language faculty in our brains which determines how languages can be structured, or from our general cognitive abilities and shared communicative needs?
This project took the latter approach in trying to explain how basic sentence structures arise. If all human languages have a shared grammatical blueprint, then organising sentence structure around categories like subject and object should be common to all languages.
Our starting point was the Austronesian language family, which covers Island Southeast Asia and most of the Pacific Ocean, and stretches all the way to Madagascar off the east coast of Africa. Within this language family, some languages do clearly structure their sentences around the categories of subject and object, while others seem to be organised in a different way which more directly reflects communicative concerns such as which aspects of a situation the speaker considers to be most important.
Moreover, we know that the Austronesian languages which do have a subject-object system have developed it from something like this other type of system. This suggests that even the most basic properties of grammatical structure are best understood as stemming from the function of human language as a system of communication.
The project used the great range of variation in structures found in the Austronesian language family to analyse how our communicative needs shape basic sentence structure and what the properties are which shape different types of system. This gives more insight into how human language, in general, works, and how human language and human experience shape and influence each other.
Financing
The project was funded by the Research Council of Norway under the FRIPRO scheme.
Duration
2018-2022
Activities
- Several project members attended the 3rd International Conference on Prominence in Language in Cologne and the 14th Austronesian and Papuan Languages and Linguistics Conference (APLL) in Berlin in June 2022. At APLL, Beth Evans was a plenary speaker, Åshild Næss and Eline Visser presented papers, and Jozina Vander Klok was on the organising committee.
- Eline Visser got a Small Grant from the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme to do fieldwork on Uruangnirin.
- From autumn 2022 we had a new project member, Eline Visser, who is funded by the Swedish Wenner-Gren Foundation. She will collect and analyse data from the undescribed language Uruangnirin, which belongs to the little-explored Central Malayo-Polynesian branch of Austronesian. Welcome, Eline!
- In May-July 2021 project members participated in the conferences:
- International Symposium on the Languages of Java/International Symposium of Malay/Indonesian Linguistics
- Austronesian and Papuan Languages and Linguistics
- International Conference of Austronesian Linguistics (indoling.com).
- In November 2020, Sindre Holmen submitted his MA thesis "Voice choice in Äiwoo: A discourse-functional study of the symmetrical voice system in Äiwoo (duo.uio.no). Congratulations, Sindre!
Events
- On May 11-12, 2021, we organised a PhD course on 'Expressions of information structure in a crosslinguistic perspective'.
- In June 2020 we hosted the 12th International Austronesian and Papuan Languages and Linguistics conference (APLL12). This is the first time APLL is being held as a digital event! See conference website for more information.
- On 9-10 December 2019, the project organised a workshop on the role of prominence in the grammar of Austronesian languages at the Australian National University.