ANALOGY IN LANGUAGE CHANGE
As languages change over time, new subsystems can emerge and grow. In the project ‘Analogical growth of grammatical systems’, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, I am working with Dávid Győrfi and Erich Round in SMG to explore how new grammatical systems emerge through the process of analogy. Our focus is on languages that make extensive use of complex predicates involving co-headed verb structures. Using synchronic and diachronic data from languages around the world, our work will result in a novel typology of co-headed verb systems and describe their evolution.
EVOLUTION OF WEST NILOTIC MORPHOLOGY
‘NILOMORPH’ is and ERC Synergy Grant that sets out to explain how the West Nilotic family evolved a morphological system where multiple grammatical categories are expressed simultaneously within a single syllable, through subtle modulations of its phonological properties. This will be achieved through the synergy of three teams, DESCRIPTION (led by Bert Remijsen), MORPHOLOGY (led by Matthew Baerman) and RECONSTRUCTION (led by Lameen Souag), employing a combination of field linguistics, acoustic analysis, experimental linguistics, computational simulation, typology, and the historical-comparative method. I am a Senior Scientist on the team responsible for exploring the morphological properties of these systems.
LITERACY DEVELOPMENT IN EAST AFRICA
The AHRC-funded ‘Nuer Literacy Initiative’ targets inequalities in access to mother-tongue education in the Nuer language, spoken in South Sudan and Ethiopia, and by a broader global diaspora community. South Sudan has some of the lowest literacy rates of any country in the world, with only around 35% of the adult population estimated to have basic literacy skills. Working with a team of Nuer authors, translators and language activist, and educational development facilitators at African Storybook, Matthew Baerman (SMG), Tatiana Reid (Edinburgh) and I have facilitated the co-production of 60 new digital storybooks, and have distributed 19,500 free printed books to benefit Nuer speakers, heritage learners and second-language learners in East Africa and beyond.
AGREEMENT CONTROLLERS AND TARGETS
Much of my research explores agreement with unexpected controllers and targets.
Prominent internal possessors are possessors that can control agreement or switch reference, despite being internal to a possessive phrase. As part of the AHRC-funded project ‘Prominent possessors’, I worked with Irina Nikolaeva (Münster), András Bárány (Edinburgh), and Grev Corbett in SMG, to determine which factors are important when possessors take on an unexpectedly prominent role in syntax .
External agreement occurs when locality restrictions on agreement are breached, and a target agrees with a controller outside of its local domain. In collaboration with Marina Chumakina and Steven Kaye in SMG, our AHRC-funded project ‘External agreement’ examined what kinds of syntactic accounts are need when when parts of speech that do not usually agree with clause level arguments (e.g. adverbs, adpositions and pronouns) nevertheless agree with non-local controllers.
DIFFERENTIAL CASE MARKING
My work on differential argument marking looks at the factors motivating the distribution of ergative case marking in the languages of Manang District, Nepal. The fieldwork for this research took place as part of a British Academy funded project, entitled ‘Optional ergative case-marking: What can be expressed by its absence?’, carried out in collaboration with Kristine Hildebrandt from SIUE and Dubi Nanda Dhakal from Tribhuvan University. The patterns of case syncretism, case morphology and differential argument marking seen in the Tamangic languages of Manang District are not identical, despite the close genetic relatedness, relative geographical proximity, and degree of contact between these languages. Rather, there is a clear split in both case syncretism and the distribution of case between Manang’s Gurungic variety, Manang Gurung, and the Manange-Nar-Phu complex.
TYPOLOGY OF NEGATION
Whilst working at SOAS I carried out a research project, entitled ‘NegTyp’, which aimed to contribute to a broader understanding of the properties of negation in language. The main objective of the project was to capture information relevant to negative constructions in terms of their morphosyntactic/prosodic realisation and the formal/semantic-pragmatic distinctions encoded by negative constructions. Outcomes from this project include work on how negation in coordination, cosubordination and subordination differs from that in independent clauses (Bond 2011) and how negation can be approached within Canonical Typology (Bond 2013). In more theoretically oriented work, I have looked at how negation can be modelled at the interface between the parallel structures of LFG, the lexicon, and the morphological component of grammar (Bond 2016, 2023)