PhD project
A grammar of Mararit
This PhD project aims to provide a comprehensive description of the Mararit language on the different linguistic levels.
- Duration
- 2025 - 2029
- Contact
- Dominique Loviscach
- Funding
- Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes
Mararit is a minority language of Chad and Sudan, spoken on either side of the border. It is currently not possible to affirm its suggested affiliation with the Nilo-Saharan macro family, but its immediate family is called “Taman/Tamaic” and includes Tama and Assangor, neighboring local languages of roughly the same size. So far, there is barely any research on the language.
Linguistic research in the entire area has been equally meager. My project contributes therefore not only to our knowledge of Mararit and Taman but is also a case study that will shed light into various features typical for this region such as coverbs, converbs, reduplication and differential object marking.
I collect the primary data used for the analysis in the course of three fieldtrips to Chad and aim to build a corpus of naturalistic language data with texts of different genres (folk stories, oral history, personal narratives, interviews and procedural texts like cooking recipes). This data will be enriched and completed by targeted elicitation. This data-driven approach helps in detecting unexpected phenomena and is crucial for achieving an analysis and description that is as comprehensive as possible.
The main output of the project will be a monograph including the grammar (phonology, morphology, syntax, information structure) as well as word list and a text collection.