Syntactic and pragmatic prominence of experiencers in cross-linguistic perspective

In this project we examine to what extent features of semantic and pragmatic prominence influence the structure of experiencer constructions. A central aim of the project is to disentangle two conflicting hypotheses for the explanation of the peculiar syntactic behaviour of experiencer arguments, which is either attributed to the natural topicality of the experiencer or to its syntactic status. We are investigating well-studied languages such as German, Greek, Korean and Chinese, as well as less-documented and endangered languages, i.e. Yucatec (Maya) and Cabécar (Chibcha). The hypotheses of the project are explored by means of experimental and corpus-linguistic methods. We aim at clarifying the relation of the factors topicality and semantic role in an experiencer typology. On the basis of experimental data we test hypotheses on the interaction of syntax and pragmatics. The corpus studies support the experiment-based generalizations by naturalistic data.
This investigation is one of the few studies that examines corpus and experimental data from non-European and understudied languages. It will supply the current theoretical discussion with a broad empirical basis.