The Project
The RHIM project explores morphosyntactic systems that are based on
a hierarchy of referents – first and second person ranking over third, humans
over non-humans, and known referents over unknown ones. This hierarchy is known
to influence the structure of grammatical relations (the basic “who does what to
whom in an event”), giving rise to e.g. inverse morphology or differential
argument marking. There have only been few comparative studies on these
phenomena, and most languages displaying these patterns (found e.g. in the
Americas, the Himalayas, and Australia), are seriously endangered. Based on
fieldwork and documentation corpora, we aim at a better understanding of such
systems from a typological and diachronic perspective.
→ full CRP description (pdf)