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Investigating three-participant events in Qaqet

With our Qaqet corpus, we also participate in a project that investigates the cross-linguistic expression of three-participant events.

...what are 'three-participant events'?

Participants to events can be people, objects or places. As an example, consider the phrase „they paddled their canoe across (the ocean)“. There are three participants involved: „they“ (someone who does something, an agent), „canoe“ (something that is being moved, a so-called theme), and „across (the ocean)“ (a path that leads to a goal). Such expressions are what we are interested in: We analyse events that involve three participants in Qaqet, ranging from very simple to more complex ones. This includes transfer events (e.g. BRING/TAKE, GIVE, …), communication events (e.g. ASK, TELL, SHOW, …), and several others.

Languages differ considerably in how they express such three-participant events. For Qaqet, we investigate a range of questions: Which verbs are used to express three-participant events? How are the participants expressed? And how do speakers use these structures in discourse? For example, Qaqet speakers follow a very interesting discourse strategy. They tend to build up complex events very slowly: they first introduce each participant (person, object or place) one after the other in a separate unit. And only in the very end, they give a summary statement that contains all the participants together in one single unit.