Amount Awarded: $18,800
Our project will carry out the first ever detailed formal semantic analyses in languages of the Eastern Polynesian family. The languages we focus on are Hawaiian and Rapa Nui. Our emphasis will be on how concepts of modality‚ “possibility and necessity‚” are expressed in these languages. The project will contribute to the documentation of understudied and endangered languages while extending our general understanding of the diverse ways modal concepts are expressed in natural languages. We are guided by the basic idea that one cannot discern what is essential and what is accidental in the way humans express modality without first stepping far outside English, and gaining a broad sense of what modes of expression are in fact already realized in natural languages.