Researcher: Elisabeth Clages
Supervisor: Jun.-Prof. Dr. Alice Mitchell, Univ.-Prof. Dr. Birgit Hellwig

In my dissertation, I investigate how participants are licensed and realized in Datooga (Southern Nilotic, Tanzania). Datooga verbs are morphologically rich and include morphemes that influence a verb’s valency, giving rise to antipassive, applicative, and causative constructions. Valency refers to a verb’s ability to determine the number and type of semantic participants involved in a clause, for example the verb sleep requires only one participant while kiss requires two. Participant coding then concerns the grammatical strategies used to express these participants. 

In my project, I examine which syntactic arguments and semantic participants intransitive (one participant), transitive (two participants), and potentially ditransitive verbs (three participants) license, which semantic roles they fulfil, and how these roles are mapped onto morphosyntactic structures. I also explore impersonal constructions, where semantically, a referent is present in the sentence, but syntactically, no subject is marked; and the conditions under which participants are only semantically, but not overtly, expressed (zero-marking).

My research combines corpus-based analysis of existing narrative, conversational, and elicitation data with new data collected in Tanzania. The aim is to expand the corpus with additional data on valency, valency-altering constructions, and impersonal constructions. The project thus contributes to the documentation of an underdescribed language and offers broader insights into argument realization, valency alternations, and the interaction between grammar and discourse.