NSF Grant

Doctors Paul Portner and Raffaella Zanuttini have been awarded a two-year grant from the National Science Foundation

Doctors Paul Portner and Raffaella Zanuttini of the Linguistics Department have been awarded a two-year grant from the National Science Foundation on the topic of “Clause Types: Form and Force in Grammatical Theory”.
The grant is in the amount of $206,664, and will bring graduate student support and a postdoctoral research fellow to the department. The purpose of the grant is to investigate how human language represents such basic functions as making a statement, asking a question, and giving an order. There are many significant but unexplained cross-linguistic patterns in how languages encode these concepts, and this research will address both empirical and theoretical aspects of the issues. On the empirical side, this support will allow the research team to study in depth two typologically diverse languages, Korean and Badiotto (a northern Italian dialect). On the theoretical side, it will provide for a detailed formal analysis of various types of speech acts and clausal structure. The project will have broader educational impacts by introducing students, both graduate and undergraduate, to techniques of linguistic fieldwork, comparative and typological research, and formal linguistic analysis.