Linguistics and language

Your paper should address at least 2 of the following questions:
• Revisit the basic word order of the language. What sorts of
movements best describe the surface word order? Is there a
word order alternation? If so, how can you explain the
alternation?
• Does the language have island effects?
• Does the language appear to obey the head-movement
constraint?
• Does the language have causatives, applicatives,
benefactives, passives, antipassives, impersonals, and/or
reflexives? Describe them.
• Does the language have a null or overt copula, or does it
depend on the context? Does the language have more than
one copula verb?
• Does the language have anaphors and/or reciprocals? Do
they appear to obey all of the binding principles? Does the
language have subject-oriented anaphors?
• Does the language have clitics? How do they behave?
• Or you may discuss any other syntactic phenomenon related
to the course material from weeks 5-8 (feel free to discuss it
with me first).
NOTE: YOU MAY NOT REPEAT TOPICS FROM DATA REPORT
1
In your paper, you should also discuss the theoretical
implications of the structure of your language. Is your language
easy to account for under the model developed in class? If not,
can you think of a way to account for it?
Note that I wrote above that you need to address these questions,
not answer them. In many cases, explaining why you cannot
provide a definitive answer makes for a better, more interesting
paper.
You should also discuss the shortcomings of your data. Were you
unable to find a crucial example? How reliable are your sources?
See the rubric below for the grading guidelines. You can use the
rubric as a kind of check-list to ensure your assignment is meeting
all of the requirements.