Linguistics Program
Staff Research
Prof. Randy LaPolla
BA, MA (SUNY, Stony Brook); MA, PhD (UC Berkeley)
Research Interests
Asian Languages on which I have done fieldwork
- Cambodian
- Chinese dialects (Southern Fujian, Beijing subdialects, Shanghai, Guangzhou dialects)
- Dulong (Trung, T'rung; 1st, 3rd, 4th township and Nujiang dialects)
- Qiang (Ronghong and Qugu varieties of the northern dialect)
- Rawang ("Nung"; Matwang and Daru dialects)
- Tagalog
- Vietnamese
Current Research Projects
Qiang Dialect Map Project
The goal of this project is to record the Qiang dialects spoken in fifty villages and then create a web site that will make all of the language data, photos/videos, and sound files available to the public. Two types of maps will appear on the site: a general map to show the location of the fifteen villages, with clickable buttons leading to the information on the language and culture of each village, and feature distribution maps, to show the spread of linguistic and cultural features. The ultimate goal is to document the influence of language contact on this language. This project has been supported by grants from the Research Committee, City University of Hong Kong (Grant No. 7001246) and the University Grants Council's Research Grants Council (Grant No. CityU 1160/02H). Further support has been provided by the Japanese Ministry of Education, Science, Sports, Culture and Technology's Project on Endangered Languages of the Pacific Rim.
Grammar, Texts and Glossary of the Northern Qiang Dialect
The goal of this project was to produce a reference grammar, texts, and glossary of the Ronghong variety of the northern dialect of the Qiang language, based on fieldwork I have been doing since 1994. The resulting grammar, A Grammar of Qiang, with Annotated Texts and Glossary, has been published (Dec. 2003) by Mouton de Gruyter. This project was originally funded by the National Science Council of the Republic of China (Grants No. NSC 85-2418-H-001-002 P2 and NSC 85-2418-H-001-005), and by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation (Grant No. RG005-D-'93). Revision and translation of the data was supported by a grant from the Research Committee, City University of Hong Kong (Grant No. 9030548). Support for further fieldwork for expansion of the draft grammar was provided by the Japanese Ministry of Education, Science, Sports, Culture and Technology's Project on Endangered Languages of the Pacific Rim. Other publications from this project include "Adjectives in Qiang", "Texts in the Qugu variety of Northern Qiang", "The Copula and Existential verbs in Qiang", "English-Qiang Glossary by Semantic Field" and "Evidentials in Qiang".
See publication pages for these publications
Rawang Fieldwork and Research
The goals of this project are similar to those of the Qiang grammar project, with fieldwork being carried out in Burma, though it is hoped a full Rawang-English, English-Rawang dictionary can be completed. The project began in 1994 as a sub-project of the Program for Southeast Asian Area Studies, Academia Sinica, entitled Dulong/Rawang Fieldwork and Research Project, and work on the production of part of the results was supported by a grant from the Research Committee, City University of Hong Kong (Rawang Texts and Dictionary Project; Grant No. 9030829). Support for further fieldwork has been provided by the Japanese Ministry of Education, Science, Sports, Culture and Technology's Project on Endangered Languages of the Pacific Rim. Output from this project includes the book Rawang Texts with Grammatical Analysis and English Translation, and the papers "Valency-changing derivations in Dulong/Rvwang", "Reflexive and Middle Marking in Dulong/Rawang", and "Copula Constructions in Rawang"; see also the Bibliography of papers on Rawang, Dulong, and Anong; and the Rawang-Dulong-Anong Language and Culture Web Site.
See publication pages for these publications
Project for Fieldwork on and Analysis of the Dulong and Anong Languages
This project was initially supported by a grant from the Research Committee, City University of Hong Kong (Grant No. 7000716). It continues work begun on Dulong as part of the Dulong/Rawang Fieldwork and Research Project funded by the Academia Sinica 1994-1997 as a sub-project of the Program for Southeast Asian Area Studies and expands the scope of the fieldwork to include the Anong language spoken by one subgroup of the Nu people. The project is being carried out together with Prof. Sun Hongkai of the Nationalities Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Output from this project includes a sketch grammar and texts of the Dizhengdang dialect of Dulong; see also the Rawang-Dulong-Anong Language and Culture Web Site.
On Grammaticalization as the Fixing of Constraints on Interpretation
This project attempts to show that there is a continuum of languages from those in which interpretation is less syntactically constrained to those where interpretation is more syntactically constrained, with the degree of grammaticalization corresponding to the degree that interpretation is constrained. This work then is trying to find the intersection where work on grammaticalization and emergent grammar intersects with work in Relevance Theory on procedural information in lexical items acting as constraints on relevance and work on contextualization cues. It is then an attempt unify these different approaches in linguistics into a single theory of cognition, communication, and the development of language (prepublication draft of paper, PDF (Adobe Acrobat) version of a draft paper written for scholars using the Relevance Theory framework; PDF (Adobe Acrobat) version of a draft of a paper written for a more general audience). See also PDF draft of a paper in Chinese on this topic presented at the First International Conference on Modern Chinese Grammar for the New Millenium (Feb 2001). This work grew out of my earlier work on Chinese (see my 1993 paper "Arguments Against 'Subject' and 'Direct Object' as Viable Concepts in Chinese" and my 1995 paper "Pragmatic Relations and Word Order in Chinese").
Project on the History of Migrations of the Sino-Tibetan Peoples.
The current state of the Sino-Tibetan language family has been shaped by wave after wave of often massive population movements. We are fortunate in that the Chinese kept records of many of these movements as early as 1000 BC (many movements were actually government sponsored). In order to understand why the language family is as it is, and why languages and dialects have formed the way they have, it is necessary to study these population movements. The first results of this project were presented at the Workshop on the Connection Between Areal Diffusion and the Genetic Model of Language Relationship, held at the Research Centre for Linguistic Typology, Australian National University, August 17-22, 1998. ("Factors involved in language change: Evidence from Sino-Tibetan" (Now revised and titled "The Role of Migration and Language Contact in the Development of the Sino-Tibetan Language Family", published in Areal Diffusion and Genetic Inheritance: Case Studies in Language Change, ed. by R. M. W. Dixon & A. Y. Aikhenvald. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001; abstract, full version in PDF format; photo from the Workshop)
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