I’ll be working on a grammar of the Bru language. As well as describing the relations between elements of the symbolic system (phonology, morphology, syntax), I’ll also look at the non-symbolic side of language; the way speakers reason with context, and especially the effects this has on the grammar. Our field situation, in which three distinct codes overlap in contexts of speaking, offers a high level of access to the answers to important questions: how does context feed linguistic structure? How do languages overlap in their answer to the first question? How do they differ?
Gus Wheeler
