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.

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.