University of Chicago

Faculty Member, Oriental Institute

Other Affiliations: University of Chicago, NELC

Fellow of the Franke Institute for the Humanities 2011-2012

About

My research interests cover four different fields of linguistics, applied to the Anatolian languages and to a lesser extent to the West-Semitic languages. Three of these fields are often interrelated: discourse cohesion, deixis, and information structure. In addition I am interested in language change in contact situations (Hattic-Hittite, Hattic-Akkadian, Hittite-Luwian and Hittite-Hurrian). To study these areas of interest I combine philology with language typology, functional grammar and sociolinguistics.

I hope to achieve two main goals. My first goal is to describe Hittite at the level of pragmatics, especially information structure and deixis. By adding this level of grammar to the description of the Anatolian languages and especially Hittite, our understanding of the texts and the communicative goals of the authors will be greatly improved.

For example, even though the semantics and syntactic relations of the following clauses are the same, they have different communicative purposes, namely to correct a piece of information held by the addressee: “The dog (not the cat) chased the horse” versus “the dog chased the cat (not the horse)”. In English this type of correcting information is often expressed by means of accent on the relevant word.

Stress to indicate information structure is claimed to be universally present in languages that are not tonal, and we may expect this as well for Hittite. But since Hittite is extinct and only transmitted in writing, prosody usually escapes us. Nevertheless, it can be shown that Hittite word order is governed by principles of information structure. Hittite sentences have basic SOV word order: “the dog the horse chased”. In order to express “The dog (not the cat) chased the horse” the corrective element needs to occur in immediately preverbal position: “the horse the dog (not the cat) chased”. This observation is in line with typological studies that show a correlation between immediately preverbal position for identificational focus and SOV word order.

However, Hittite has another special position for identificational focus. In order to express that constituents like ‘the cat’ in “The dog chased also the cat (in addition to the horse)” are in additive focus, such a constituent will always be in (modified) initial position “The cat+too the dog chased”, preceding all other constituents.

The fact that languages can have several dedicated identificational focus positions is not widely recognized. In my view the study of an extinct language like Hittite can lead to surprising observations that require modification

s of current theory. Thus, my second goal is to help develop methods for applying modern linguistic theories and models to dead languages that in turn will allow these languages to inform linguistic theory.

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