This Winter break, I worked with Professor Cati Fortin on her research into the syntactic structure of comparatives in Indonesian. Comparatives are linguistic structures that allow for comparisons, such as in sentences like Rudi is taller than Siti; when the part of the sentence following than looks like a noun, it is called a Phrasal Comparative (Rudi is taller than Siti), whereas when that part resembles a clause, we call it a Clausal Comparative (Rudi ate more than Siti ate). Now, for a comparative to work, much like any other sentence in human language, there needs to be some internal structure that relates the different words in the sentence to each other, which we call the Syntax, and there needs to be some Semantic material to help bring together the overall meaning of the sentence from the meanings we associate with each individual word. Thus, when faced with these two different surface-level comparison structures, the question arises about whether phrasal comparatives need to be accounted for by a different underlying syntactic and semantic structure than clausal comparatives (the ‘Direct Analysis’), or whether both of them are based on the same underlying structure, with deletion of words accounting for the lack of verb-like material in the phrasal comparative (the ‘Reduced Analysis’).
There is compelling evidence for a Direct Analysis approach within Indonesian of comparative sentences created with the words dari and daripada, which are equivalent to than (and which, we hypothesize, head phrasal and clausal comparatives respectively), and some similarity between Indonesian comparatives and comparatives in languages like Malagasy, Russian, Lithuanian and Hindi, which have been argued in prior literature to support a Direct Analysis approach for their phrasal comparatives. However, there are also stylistic differences between dari (less formal) and daripada (more formal) that might be influencing speakers’ notions about the usage of either word in a way that is not based on their underlying syntactic structures, which makes researching the phenomenon more difficult.
As Cati had already made significant progress on finding and reading prior literature on comparatives and has also conducted research on Indonesian sluicing and ellipsis, my first responsibility was to read through a collection of several key papers in the field and familiarize myself with their findings and make notes on the ways that I thought they intersected with each other. Thereafter, Cati and I worked together to try to combine mine and her understandings of the literature, as well as to look at some grammaticality judgments Cati had already collected from native speakers for sentences including dari and daripada, with the purpose of outlining the material that should be discussed in her planned papers on the topic, as well as identifying gaps in the data
This Student Research Partnership was extremely helpful to me, as it helped me hone my ability to read Linguistics papers at speed and figure out what were the most important takeaways in them. I feel like my understanding of Syntax and Semantics have definitely improved since the start of the Winter break, and I now feel a lot more confident in my ability to carry out the research for my Linguistics Comps, which happens to also involve a lot of Syntax and Semantics. On the whole, this was an incredible experience, and I’m grateful for the skills that I’ll take with me into everything I’ll do next!