Referential Hierarchies in Morphosyntax description, typology, diachrony
EuroBABEL
A EuroBABEL Project
ESF
DFG
NSF
SNSF
AHRC
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The Project

The RHIM project explores morphosyntactic systems that are based on a hierarchy of referents – first and second person ranking over third, humans over non-humans, and known referents over unknown ones. This hierarchy is known to influence the structure of grammatical relations (the basic “who does what to whom in an event”), giving rise to e.g. inverse morphology or differential argument marking. There have only been few comparative studies on these phenomena, and most languages displaying these patterns (found e.g. in the Americas, the Himalayas, and Australia), are seriously endangered. Based on fieldwork and documentation corpora, we aim at a better understanding of such systems from a typological and diachronic perspective.

full CRP description (pdf)

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