School of Languages and Linguistics - Theses

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Subject: Australian languages × Subject: affectedness × Subject: morphosyntax ×

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    Argument realisation in Wubuy
    Horrack, Kate ( 2018)
    In Wubuy, a highly endangered polysynthetic language from northern Australia, there are a number of morphosyntactic phenomena that can manipulate how verbal arguments are realised, including causative, affectedness and conjunctive constructions. However, the reasons why these sometimes vary in their effect on argument realisation are unclear, as are the ways they are distributed and constrained. In fact, there are very few descriptions of languages with multiple valency-changing processes that provide detailed accounts of them and how they interact with each other. This is a problem because it means that when we take a given verb, we are unable to predict how (or even if) it can participate in such constructions, nor can we predict what the range of possible interpretations will be. Through a reconsideration of the current corpus and the collection of new data, this thesis uses empirical description and analysis to investigate the distribution and constraints of causative, affectedness and conjunctive constructions in a number of ways, including: considering how a verb’s transitivity, semantic subclass and argument-structure influences its interaction with derivational morphology and the morphosyntactic realisation of arguments; extending investigations past the current (and crosslinguistically) predominant focus on morphological constructions to also include lexical and syntactic ones; and approaching similar construction types in a unified way (e.g. comparing verb agreement strategies in coordinative, comitative and reciprocal contexts of conjunction). In doing so, this thesis not only clarifies the constraints and interactions mentioned above, it also discovers several construction types that were previously undescribed for Wubuy, some of which are also underdescribed in the broader Australian, polysynthetic and crosslinguistic contexts.