Abdoulaye Laziz NCHARE

Current location (updated hourly): New York.

Office: Rm. 728, 7th Floor, 726 Broadway

Status: Graduate student and LANYU member

Linguistic interests: I am interested in the morphosyntax of Bantu languages, the syntax of English and French, and general issues in syntactic theory, including the proper role of syntax and morphology in the larger architecture of grammar. I have worked on issues as various as head movement, syntax of questions, verb reduplication and serialization, agreement, clause structure and negation in Shupamem. My main focus is investigating the syntactic behaviour of as wide a variety of languages as possible, with regard to both typology and contrastive studies of Bantu languages.

This might be slightly different from comparitive syntax in that it involves the comparison not of languages but of theories and theoretical models. At this time I regard this area, comparative syntactic theory, as my primary research interest, superseding all others; to a great extent, my interests in typology and comparative and historical linguistics are oriented toward providing raw, empirical data to feed my primary research interest. I am greatly concerned about the adequacy of theoretical models of human syntactic behavior as representations of actual cognitive processes inside human brains/minds, and therefore strive to investigate any given claim within a particular theoretical framework or approach to syntactic theory that happens to grab my attention from the point of view of both descriptive adequacy (Is it validated by the actual relevant linguistic data?) and of psychological plausibility (Is it compatible with what other cognitive sciences tell us about human cognitive processes? -- of course, this is a question that works both ways, since linguistics is also one of the principal disciplines among the cognitive sciences and itself one of the most fruitful sources of information on cognitive processes.) I would like, ideally, to identify the one, best theoretical framework for syntactic research and the description of Grassfield Bantu Languages. However, I entertain the possibility that the reality may be a lot messier than that, in the sense that it is unfeasible to describe all the relevant facts within a single framework, and that a complementary conjunction of distinct frameworks may be necessary for the task.

At present, I claim familiarity with the ‘Principles & Parameters Approach’(PPA) [also known as ‘Government & Binding’ (GB), ‘the Revised Extended Standard Theory’ (REST), or `the Minimalist Program'], Cognitive Grammar, Generalized Phrase-Structure Grammar (GPSG), Head-Driven Phrase-Structure Grammar (HPSG), Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG). As can be seen, my acquaintance includes relatively ‘formal’ frameworks. I would be very excited to discover a most powerful grammar which might be more descriptively adequate for languages allowing more than one option in expressing the same idea (i.e in Deriving Greenberg Universal 20, I found that if we consider, Demonstrative-Numeral-Adjective-Noun in this order, 17 possible orders are attested to be grammatical in Shupamem, one of the Grassfield Bantu languages which overtly contradicts Cinque’s (2006) assumptions arguing that only 14 possible orders are attested crosslinguistically. Interesting enough is the existence of possible functional categories which are not truly discussed, for example, negation in Shupamem involves an Intensifier Phrase which expresses the impossibility of an action or a process in the language. A question then arises, how can we integrate such functional categories and motivate their existence in Comparative Syntax? Different theoretical frameworks should be able to complement each other. That’s why one of my chief concerns is to foster the idea that the better job in investigating a language is not to test the best syntactic theory, but to test as many approaches as possible in order to have more insights about the data in hand.

Education:

2002-2006. Doctorate in Linguistics, Yaounde I University, Cameroon.
Thesis Title: A Minimalist and Derivational Approach to the Morphosyntax of Shupamem
2001-2003: M.A. in Linguisttics, Yaounde I University, Cameroon. Dissertation Title: A Minimalist Analysis of Verb Movement in Yemba.
1998-2001:B.A. in Linguistics, Yaounde I University, Cameroon