A study on information structure in Syriac

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Michael Waltisberg
• Subject Area: Applied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics ; Islamic Studies, Arabian Studies, Semitic Studies
• Term: from 2015 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 269347884

Syriac, the best attested premodern dialect of Aramaic and a Semitic language with a vast literature, is of major importance for the culture and religious history of the Near East. It is relevant to a number of scholarly disciplines such as Semitic Linguistics, Islamic Studies, Historical and General Linguistics, as well as the Christian Orient and the History of Christianity.There exist some standard grammars of Syriac, mostly dating from the 19th and early 20th centuries, but there is clearly a lack of syntactic studies, especially in the fields of discourse grammar and information structure which are of great importance to the study of language in general. At the centre lies the question how the structure of a clause is related to the communicative situation in which it is uttered; or, put differently, in what linguistic form the speakers (i.e. the authors) choose to convey meanings and thus ensure the mutual intelligibility in a given context. Of special importance is the question how a particular formal structure is motivated, or why an alternative construction is preferred. The interaction of morphology, morphosyntax, syntax, semantics and information structure helps to better understand the functioning of Syriac syntax.These issues are the topic of the proposed project and will be investigated on the basis of a representative corpus of Syriac texts. It is the aim of the project to describe and explain the mechanisms relevant to information structure and their uses and interactions in Syriac. It will be argued that Syriac has specific morphosyntactic means which reflect notions of discourse grammar and information structure, and that these are employed non-arbitrarily. Further aims of the project are to register these recursive patters of language usage and to describe the correspondences of form and meaning. Topic and focus types and their correlation with formal structures, as well as patterns of marking pragmatic functions, will be investigated.The project hopes to take a significant step towards a complete description and explanation of Syriac syntax. The results of the project may eventually be applied to other Aramaic linguistic varieties, as well as to the methodology of Semitic Linguistics in general.The project is divided in two phases: the documentation of synchronic features (collection and translation); and the interpretation and presentation of the results of the study. The overall methodological approach is inductive.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants