Beyond split case marking: Participant coding strategies in East African languages (B02)

• Subject Area: Applied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics
• Term: since 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 281511265

The project investigates participant coding strategies in two East African languages with split case marking and word order variation: Datooga (Nilotic, Tanzania) and Tima (Niger-Congo, Sudan). The goal is to understand how interlocutors deploy the various morphosyntactic constructions at their disposal for prominence management in discourse. The investigation is based on corpora of natural discourse, taking into account the discourse context, the socio-relational dynamics between the interlocutors, and the role of co-speech gesture.

• DFG Programme: Collaborative Research Centres
• Subproject of: SFB 1252: Prominence in Language
• Applicant Institution: Universität zu Köln
• Project Heads: Professorin Birgit Hellwig, Ph.D.; Professorin Dr. Alice Mitchell