Morphology Building Syntax: Constructive Case in Australian Languages
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Morphology Building Syntax Constructive Case in Australian Languages Rachel Nordlinger Stanford University Pro ceedings of the LFG Conference University of California San Diego Miriam Butt and Tracy Holloway King Editors CSLI Publications httpwwwcslistanfordedupublications LFG R Nordlinger Morphology Building Syntax Constructive Case in Australia Intro duction A dening characteristic of lfg is that morphological words can carry the same kinds of functional information as syntactic phrases words and phrases are alternative means of enco ding the same syntactic relations Kaplan and Bresnan Bresnan That morphology comp etes with syntax in this way Bresnan is seen most clearly in noncongurational languages where inectional morphology takes on much of the functional load of phrase structure in more congura tional languages like English determining grammatical functions and constituency relations lfg is thus wellsuited to the analysis of noncongurationality and has pioneered muchwork on non congurational languages b oth in Australia and elsewhere Mohanan Bresnan Simpson Kro eger T Mohanan Austin and Bresnan Nordlinger and Bresnan Andrews among many others In this pap er I will b e concerned with the function of case in the dep endentmarking non congurational languages of Australia These Australian languages haveunusually extensive case marking and case concord Intuitively as has b een suggested bymany researchers working with these languages eg Hale Simpson Nash Austin Evans a it is this case marking that enables their noncongurationalityby directly constructing all of the information ab out grammatical functions removing the need for such information to also b e represented in the phrase structure I will show that an analysis of case using insideout function application in lfg can intuitively capture this constructive prop erty of case marking as well as providing a straightforward accountofmanyunusual prop erties of case in these Australian languages including the use of case to mark tenseasp ectmo o d and the complex phenomenon of case stacking Data I will b egin by outlining the empirical facts ab out these Australian languages that I seek to account for These range from issues much discussed in the literature on noncongurationality Hale Jelinek Laughren Sp eas Simpson Baker Austin and Bresnan such as the interaction of case with free word order and the p ossibility of discontinuous constituents to those that have received relatively little attention in recent theoretical literature case stacking and the use of case to mark clauselevel information such as tenseasp ectmo o d Case determines grammatical functions In many of these dep endentmarking Australian languages the order of constituents in simple clauses is grammatically unconstrained in suchaway that case marking is frequently the sole indicator of grammatical relations eg Hale Austin In the following elicited example from Wambaya a nonPamaNyungan language from the Barkly Tablelands region of the Northern Territory all orderings of constituents are grammatical as long as the auxiliary here This pap er is based on my dissertation Nordlinger which has b enetted enormously from advice com ments and suggestions byalargenumb er of p eople I would particularly like to thank Joan Bresnan Peter Sells Nick Evans Paul Kiparsky Mary Dalrymple Ron Kaplan and Avery Andrews for extensive discussion of these issues Versions of this pap er have also b een presented in the So ciable Syntax Supp er Group at Stanford January and at the Spring Meeting of the Linguistic Asso ciation of Great Britain in Edinburgh April I am grateful to those audiences for much useful feedback Finally I am deeply indebted to myWambayateachers Molly Grueman Minnie Nimara Mavis Hogan and Powder OKeefe for teaching me their language on whichmany of these ideas are based Unfortunately all aws and inadequacies are myown LFG R Nordlinger Morphology Building Syntax Constructive Case in Australia gina remains in second p osition Ngajbi gina alaji janyini see sgmapst boyiacc dogierg The dog sawtheboy Alaji gina ngajbi janyini Alaji gina janyini ngajbi Ngajbi gina janyini alaji Janyini gina alaji ngajbi Janyini gina ngajbi alaji In Wambaya as in many of these Australian languages word order can not b e used as an indicator of grammatical function in main clauses there is no basic order in which the dierent grammatical functions are asso ciated with particular p ositions in the phrase structure Nordlinger In Press Instead information ab out sub ject ob ject and other grammatical functions is sp ecied solely from the morphology usually from the case morphology Case concord asso ciates discontinuous constituents In many of these Australian languages this word order freedom extends to np constituents which can app ear discontiguously in the clause eg Hale Simpson Nash Austin Nordlinger In Press The fact that they b elong to a single nominal expression is indicated by their case concord Many languages also require complete case and numb er concord within contiguous nps Dench and Evans Examples here are from Jiwarli PamaNyungan centralwestern Western Australia and Wambaya Nganki ngiya lurrgbanyi wardangarringani thissgi ierg sgfapst grab mo oniierg alaji gulugbarda boyiacc sleepinf The mo on grabb ed her sleeping child Wambaya Nordlinger ex Karla wanthanmarni jarnpa juma reacc giveimperhence lightacc smallacc Give me a small re light Jiwarli Austin ex Bungmajbuliji ngankawuliji wurlaji daguma oldwomanduerg thisiiduerg duahabpst hit juwarramba meniacc These two old ladies had b een killing all of the men Wambaya Nordlinger ex The abbreviations used in this pap er are as follows a transitive sub ject abl ablative acc accusative all allative dat dative du dual erg ergative f feminine hab habitual ii ii i iiv noun class markers imper imp erative inf innitive inst instrumental loc lo cative m masculine mabl mo dal ablative mloc mo dal lo cative mprop mo dal proprietive negpot negative p otential nfut nonfuture nom nominative npst nonpast o ob ject pot p otential prop proprietive pst past sg singular spec sp ecic In some languages likeWambaya b ound pronouns on the auxiliary also determine grammatical functions In however we see that the auxiliary information alone is not adequate in this case it sp ecies only that the sub ject is third p erson singular and has masculine gender which is true for b oth noun phrases in the clause LFG R Nordlinger Morphology Building Syntax Constructive Case in Australia Pijinha manthartanha wankarlarninyja ngulupa martarulu manyacc manacc livemakepst thatergspec gumerg That gum has cured many p eople Jiwarli Austin ex Case Stacking In some Australian languages case concord extends even to forms that are already inected with a case ax This results in case stacking where a single nominal carries multiple case markers each one indicating a higher relationship within the clause Dench and Evans Simpson Evans b Dench b Austin Andrews In these examples case markers do not only determine the grammatical function for the nominal to which they are attached but provide the relation for higher phrases in which they are emb edded also Karntangku karla kurduku miyi yinyi parrajarlaku womanerg presdat babydat fo o d givenpst co olamonlocdat The woman is giving fo o d to the baby who is in the co olamon Warlpiri Simpson exb dankinabanguni dangkanabanguni mirranguni walbunguni thisabl inst manabl inst go o dinst raftinst with this mans go o d raft Kayardild Evans a ex Ngayu nhawulha tharntaa sgnom sawpst euroacc mirtilymartaa tharangkamartaa jo eypropacc pouchlocpropacc I saw that euro with a jo ey in its p ouch Martuthunira Dench a ex In from Warlpiri PamaNyungan Central Australia the lo cative adjunct parrajarla co olamonloc is further inected with the dative case to indicate that it is predicated of the dative argument of the clause namely kurduku babydat Thus the nominal parraja is inected with twocasemarkers the rst indicates that it is a lo cative adjunct and the second indicates that it mo dies a dative argument In from Kayardild nonPamaNyungan Northwestern Queens land each memb er of the emb edded genitive phrase this mans is inected with the ablative case the case used to mark the genitive relation Then by virtue of b eing emb edded within the larger instrumental noun phrase with this mans go o d raft eachmemb er is additionally inected with the instrumental case thereby also indicating the function of the higher np in which they are em b edded And nally in from Martuthunira PamaNyungan central coast Western Australia the most emb edded nominal tharangkamartaa p ouchlocprop acc is inected with three case markers The lo cative sux relates p ouch with jo ey the proprietive sux relates the emb edded phrase jo ey in p ouch to the head nominal euro note that it is marked on b oth elements of the emb edded phrase and the accusative case sux app ears on all elements of the higher noun phrase to indicate that it functions as the ob ject of the clause Thus the morphological structure of a single nominal can with the use of stacked case suxes mark successively emb edded syntactic relationships It is clear that case marking in these languages has a fundamental role in determining the syn tactic relations In fact these relations need not b e expressed in the phrase structure at all but A co olamon is a carved carrying dish LFG R Nordlinger Morphology Building Syntax Constructive Case in Australia are constructed directly