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This project represents joint work by Paul Portner and Raffaella Zanuttini of the Linguistics Department of Georgetown University, with the assistance of Miok Pak, a postdoc at Georgetown, and Simon Mauck, a graduate student at Georgetown. Drs. Portner and Zanuttini 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 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 project will 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.