Clause Types: Form and Force in Grammatical Theory

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In 2003, Paul Portner and Raffaella Zanuttini were awarded a two-year grant from the National Science Foundation on the topic of "Clause Types:  Form and Force in Grammatical Theory"

The purpose of the grant was to investigate how human language represents such basic functions as making a statement, asking a question, and giving an order. There are many significant but unexplained cross-linguistic patterns in how languages encode these concepts, and this research addressed both empirical and theoretical aspects of the issues. On the empirical side, we studied in depth two typologically diverse languages, Korean and Badiotto (a northern Italian dialect). On the theoretical side, we aimed to provide a detailed formal analysis of various types of speech acts and clausal structure.