From juxtaposition to incorporation: an approach to Generic-Specific constructions

In this paper, we present an analysis of classifier noun incorporation in Gunwinyguan languages from northern Australia, focussing particularly on generic-specific constructions. We show how the analysis of Sadler and Nordlinger (2006) for generic-specific constructions formed through nominal juxtaposition can be extended to account for incorporated generic-specific constructions also. In this analysis, each nominal (or incorporated noun) is treated as belonging to a set at f-structure, on a par with the standard LFG treatment of coordination. The difference between the various set-based constructions (including coordinations, generic-specific constructions and part-whole constructions) arises in the mapping to the semantic structure. We show how this provides a single unified analysis for all generic-specific constructions in these languages, whether incorporated or juxtaposed. In doing so, we provide the first LFG analysis of classifier incorporation with doubling

Putting it All Together: Agreement, Incorporation, Coordination and External Possession in Wubuy (Australia)

In this paper we examine the interaction of a number of grammatical phenomena in Wubuy, a polysynthetic language from northern Australia, and show how they can be given a comprehensive analysis within the framework of LFG. While each of these phenomena ? noun incorporation, verbal agreement, coordination and external possession ? has received various treatments within the LFG literature, no one study has addressed the compatibility of these analyses under interaction, despite the fact that they frequently co-occur in the world?s languages. We use data from Wubuy to showcase the effects of this interaction, and investigate the implications for LFG and for LFG analyses of polysynthetic languages more generally

Relating Morphology to Syntax

B1 - Research Book Chapter

Sentence planning and production in Murrinhpatha, an Australian 'free word order' language

Psycholinguistic theories are based on a very small set of unrepresentative languages, so it is as yet unclear how typological variation shapes mechanisms supporting language use. In this article we report the first on-line experimental study of sentence production in an Australian free word order language: Murrinhpatha. Forty-six adult native speakers of Murrinhpatha described a series of unrelated transitive scenes that were manipulated for humanness (±human) in the agent and patient roles while their eye movements were recorded. Speakers produced a large range of word orders, consistent with the language having flexible word order, with variation significantly influenced by agent and patient humanness. An analysis of eye movements showed that Murrinhpatha speakers' first fixation on an event character did not alone determine word order; rather, early in speech planning participants rapidly encoded both event characters and their relationship to each other. That is, they engaged in relational encoding, laying down a very early conceptual foundation for the word order they eventually produced. These results support a weakly hierarchical account of sentence production and show that speakers of a free word order language encode the relationships between event participants during earlier stages of sentence planning than is typically observed for languages with fixed word orders

Prosodic phrasing, pitch range, and word order variation in Murrinhpatha

Like many Indigenous Australian languages, Murrinhpatha has flexible word order with no apparent configurational syntax. We analyzed an experimental corpus of Murrinhpatha utterances for associations between different thematic role orders, intonational phrasing patterns and pitch downtrends. We found that initial constituents (Agents or Patients) tend to carry the highest pitch targets (HiF0), followed by patterns of downstep and declination. Sentence-final verbs always have lower Hif0 values than either initial or medial Agents or Patients. Thematic role order does not influence intonational patterns, with the results suggesting that Murrinhpatha has positional prosody, although final nominals can disrupt global pitch downtrends regardless of thematic role

Case stacking in realizational morphology

Case stacking, the phenomenon whereby a single word may bear multiple cases reflecting its relation to a number of different syntactic elements, is an important phenomenon both for the development of theories of inflectional morphology and for our understanding of the relation between morphology and syntax. However, to date it has received virtually no attention from theoretical morphology. Working within the inferential-realizational framework of paradigm function morphology (PFM), we provide a morphological analysis of the phenomenon of case stacking as found in the Australian Aboriginal languages Kayardild (Tangkic) and Martuthunira (Pama-Nyungan). We argue that the standard assumptions concerning morphological property sets in PFM are too weak to satisfactorily accommodate case stacking morphology, and we propose that (in some languages) the morphological property sets which define paradigm cells are structured rather than being the simple objects of the standard view. We show how this provides a comprehensive analysis of the complex case and number stacking facts and further, allows for a straightforward (although nontrivial) mapping between the morphology and the syntax as outlined in Sadler and Nordlinger (2004). © Walter de Gruyter

Verbless Clauses: Revealing the Structure Within

In direct contrast to their frequency amongst the world’s languages, verbless constructions, such as those illustrated in the following examples (taken from Stassen 1997:62-63), have received relatively little attention in the lfg literature