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Non-configurationality in Australian aboriginal languages

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Abstract

The syntax of the Australian Aboriginal language Warlpiri has led to two opposing models of non-configurationality: a dual structure hypothesis, which abandons the projection principle for a grammatical architecture that separates constituency and functional representations (Simpson 1983, 1991, Hale 1983, Kroeger 1993), and a pronominal argument hypothesis, which hypothesizes that bound or zero pronominals satisfy the projection principle in such languages, with free nominals analysed as adjuncts (Jelinek 1984, Baker 1991, Hale 1993). Although the pronominal argument hypothesis is widely accepted in the syntactic literature, we show that available evidence from Warlpiri, new evidence from the related language Jiwarli, and a survey of six other Australian languages actually support the dual structure hypothesis. The non-configurationality characteristics of free word order, null anaphora, and split NPs are in fact independent of each other and of the distribution of bound pronouns. Additionally, the clitic pronouns that Jelinek (1984) and others take to be the source of non-configurationality in Warlpiri are simply an areal feature of Australian languages that is independent of the syntactic properties that are supposed to derive from it.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Linguistics, LaTrobe University, 3083, Bundoora, Victoria, Australia

    Peter Austin

  2. Linguistics Department, Stanford University, 94305, Stanford, CA, USA

    Joan Bresnan

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  1. Peter Austin
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This paper results from joint research carried out at Stanford University Department of Linguistics September–December 1993. Austin wishes to thank Stanford University and La Trobe University for financial support which made this work possible. We are grateful to Mark Baker for extensive discussion of the ideas presented here; helpful comments also came from Jim Blevins, Maya Bradley, Bernard Comrie, Mary Dalrymple, Cathryn Donohue, Nick Evans, Ken Hale, Dick Hudson, Eloise Jelinek, Randy La Polla, Mary Laughren, Chris Manning, Rachel Nordlinger, Robert Pensalfini, Jane Simpson, students in Stanford Linguistics 223 and 226, Tasaku Tsunoda, seminar audiences at Kobe University and University of Tsukuba, and two anonymous NLLT reviewers. Barry Blake, Alan Dench, Rachel Nordlinger and David Wilkins generously provided unpublished data.

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Austin, P., Bresnan, J. Non-configurationality in Australian aboriginal languages. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 14, 215–268 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00133684

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