Discourse Prominence in Four Australian Languages

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Discourse Prominence in Four Australian Languages

• Ilana Mushin and Jane Simpson
• University of Sydney

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Free Word Order

• In Australian languages, the clause does not
  function to signal grammatical status
• Ordering principles are governed by pragmatics
  (Hale 1992)
• Vast literature on the pragmatics of word order
  (including theme/rheme Prague School, SFL,
  most newsworthy first Mithun 1992)

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Important ideas from earlier work on Australian
languages

• salience of initial position (eg. Ngiyampaa,
  Donaldson 1980, Kalkatungu, Blake 1983, etc)
• pre-verbal position as a focus position
  (Warlpiri, Hale1992)
• discourse salience of what pronominal clitics
  attach to (eg. McConvell 1980. Rose 2001,
  Laughren 2002, Mushin 2005)
• distinguishing the behaviour of nominals from
  that of pronouns (eg. Kalkatungu, Blake 1983 )

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Ordering templates for individual languages

• Examples
• Kalkatungu (Blake 1983)
• (focus)-topic-(rest of) comment
• Pitjantjatjara (Bowe 1989)
• TOPIC-S FOCUS VERB-ANTITOPIC
• Also Warlpiri (Swartz 1991, Laughren 2002, Legate
  2002), Jiwarli (Austin 2001), Garrwa (Mushin to
  appear), Waanyi (Laughren et al 2005)

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Our Questions

• How homogeneous are Australian languages in their
  patterns of ordering?
• How can we account for variations in preferred
  orders?
• What can this tell us about the
  grammaticalisation of ordering (eg
  grammaticalisation of pronominal clitics)

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Methodology

• Quantitative analysis of texts, mostly
  narrative - presented here
• Qualitative analysis of information structure
  in texts, in progress

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New and Prominent

• Choi (1999) Transparent terms (cf. Rheme and
  Kontrast)
• New - information which has not been mentioned,
  or is not recoverable from context.
• Prominent - information that runs counter to
  expectations
• Combinations of new and prominent provide
  switch topic, focus, contrastive focus,
  carryover topic
• Cf. Focus (eg. Van Valin 1993), Rheme and
  Kontrast (Vallduvi Vilkuna 1998), Rheme, New
  (SFL,eg. McGregor 1994, Rose 2001),
  Identificational Focus (E Kiss 1998), Argument
  Focus (Lambrecht 1994).

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We are looking at

• What goes in initial position and what is its
  pragmatic status.
• What is the preferred position for verbs, and how
  is this influenced by pragmatic factors?
• What is the preferred position for pronouns, and
  how is this influenced by pragmatic factors?

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Pronouns

• Pronouns are an important tool for discourse
  coherence (marks retrievable information, assumed
  common ground)
• Australian languages differ in the
  morphosyntactic status of their pronominal
  systems (Dixon 2002)
• Free and bound pronouns
• Prefix and enclitic pronouns
• Free pronouns only

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The speakers toolkit

• Languages usually have a number of means of
  coding information as new and/or prominent
• Eg. prosody, special morphology, clefts and other
  marked syntactic structures.

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The languages
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The corpus
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Clause length
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1. Initial position

• Initial position is used for information that is
  both new and prominent
• Consistent with Mithuns (1992) newsworthy
  first principle

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What comes first in our corpus?

• Interrogatives
• Answers to information questions
• Contrasts
• Markers of sentential negation
• Introduction of new (significant) discourse
  participants

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2. Where do the verbs go?

• Word order typologies have focussed on ordering
  of grammatical functions (eg. A,S,O) with respect
  to verb
• Our languages dont use word order for
  grammatical functions, although there are
  preferences (e.g. Jiwarli and Warlpiri S/A V
  preference)
• Text analysis shows clear patterns of verb
  placement in the data.

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(No Transcript)
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Summary

• Clear preference for Garrwa sentences to be verb
  initial. This is the pragmatically neutral
  place for verbs
• Sharp dip in second position verbs in Garrwa and
  Warlpiri is because this is the normal place for
  pronouns (Garrwa) and Auxiliary, including
  pronominal clitics (Warlpiri)
• Second position is preferred place for verbs in
  Jiwarli (no bound pronouns) and Nyangumarta
  (post-verbal pronominal clitics)

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Verb initial and prominence

• Garrwa verb initial is neither new nor prominent
• Austin (2001) claims that Jiwarli initial verbs
  indicate new information (not necessarily
  prominent).
• Warlpiri verbs are put in initial position as a
  last resort, to host the AUX. In clauses of 3
  constituents, an initial verb is prominent.

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3. Pronouns

• 1. All pronouns are - new, expressing
  carry-over topics for example
• 2. Pronouns may be prominent, expressing
  contrastive information for example
• 3. These languages have free and bound pronouns,
  whose use is determined in part by prominence.

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Prominent Pronouns (Garrwa Example)
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Frequency of free pronouns

• The two languages with bound pronouns differ as
  to how often free pronouns are used.
• Nyangumarta 110 pronouns in 570 clauses
• Warlpiri 19 pronouns in 282 clauses
• Jiwarli Austin (2001) notes that third person
  singular pronouns are rarely used.
• Garrwa third person singular pronouns are rare

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Where do the pronouns go?

• Three interrelated factors
• The position of the pronoun in the clause
• Whether the pronoun is adjacent to the verb
• Whether the pronoun precedes or follows the verb

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Free pronouns

• Following charts concern free pronouns only
• Subject and object pronouns
• All languages had few free object pronouns

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(No Transcript)
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Subject pronouns in clauses
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Adjacency to verb
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Order with respect to verb
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Summary

• Languages vary as to how verbs can appear
  initially (pragmatically marked or pragmatically
  neutral)
• Languages vary as to whether free Subject
  pronouns tend to appear initially or in second
  position
• Jiwarli and Garrwa show strong preference for
  adjacency to verb
• Warlpiri, Jiwarli and Nyangumarta show a
  preference for subject pronouns to precede verbs

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From free to bound pronouns

• The preference for second position free pronouns
  in Garrwa and Jiwarli shows how second position
  enclitic pronouns might develop
• Garrwa pronouns are moving towards second
  position enclitic status, but have a strong
  association with the verb by virtue of verb
  initial status
• Jiwarli pronouns also gravitate to second
  position but are in competition with verbs here.

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Where to go from here?

• Look at more clauses more pronouns, more object
  pronouns
• More qualitative text analysis of contexts for
  different ordering configurations
• Analysis of 1st/2nd person and 3rd person
  independently
• More languages for comparison

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Contact Details

• Ilana.mushin_at_arts.usyd.edu.au
• Or
• jhs_at_mail.usyd.edu.au