Categories, Constituents, And Constituent Order In Pitjantjatjara: An Aboriginal Language Of Australia (croom Helm Linguistics Series)

A description of the syntax of the Australian Aboriginal language Pitjantjatjara. This book looks at the relevant categories and constituents in the language and examines the question of whether the constituents exhibit a syntactically basic order. The data shows that word order in a range of constructions is constrained and Heather Bowe argues that these facts would be consistent with an analysis of word order being syntactically significant in Pitjantjatjara. The constraints on word order are of particular interest in that they contrast significantly with word order features reported for the neighbouring language Warlpiri, widely considered to be a canonical "free word order" language. The topics of syntactic constituency and word order are relevant to current research on linguistic theory and the possible existence of "non-configurational" languages as addressed by Chomsky, as well as to the typological study of languages as addressed by Joseph Greenberg. The detailed descriptions of complex sentence constructions, including switch-references, will interest linguistics working within the generative tradition as well those working within a typological framework. Heather Bowe has lived in the Pitjantjatjara area in central Australia and her study is based on the extensive field data, including narrative texts, collected during this period. Title page Contents Preface Abbreviations and conventions 1 Introduction and preliminaries 1.1 The Pitjantjatjara language 1.2 Previous publications on Pitjantjatjara and related dialects 1.3 Methodological approach to this study 2 Simple sentences 2.1 Case marking 2.2 Verbs 2.3 The noun phrase 2.4 Sentence level adverbial modifiers 2.5 Sentence second position 2.6 Zero noun phrases and ellipsis 3 Complex sentences 3.1 Subordination 3.2 Subordination and switch reference 3.3 Co-ordination and switch reference 3.4 Relative clauses 3.5 Are subordinate clauses nominalizations? 4 Evidence of basic word order in Pitjantjatjara 4.1 Noun phrase internal constituent order 4.2 Clause level word order 4.3 Comparison of Pitjantjatjara and cross category word order universals 5 Evidence of hierarchical structure 5.1 Hierarchical structure within the noun phrase 5.2 Hierarchical structure at the sentence level 5.3 The issue of configurationality Notes References Appendix Index A description of the syntax of the Aboriginal language Pitjantjatjara, this book examines the various constraints on word order in contrast to the free word order of the neighbouring language Warlpiri. The topics explored are relevant to current research on linguistic theory. Examines the syntax of Pitjantjatjara through word order, case markings, switch reference and transitivity in simple and complex sentences to determine a basic word order and hierarchical noun phrase and sentence structure Heather J. Bowe. Revised Version Of Author's Thesis (ph. D.)--university Of Southern California, 1987. Includes Bibliographical References.