School of Languages and Linguistics - Research Publications
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ItemConstructive Case: Evidence from Australian Languages(CSLI Publications, 1998-01-01)Australian Aboriginal languages have many interesting grammatical characteristics that challenge some of the central assumptions of current linguistic theory. These languages exhibit many unusual morphosyntactic characteristics that have not yet been adequately incorporated into current linguistic theory. This volume focuses on the complex properties of case morphology in these nonconfigurational languages, including extensive case stacking and the use of case to mark tense/aspect/mood. While problematic for many syntactic approaches, these case properties are given a natural and unified account in the lexicalist model of constructive case developed in this book, which allows case morphology to construct the larger syntactic context independently of phrase structure.
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ItemA Grammar of Wambaya, Northern Australia(Pacific Linguistics Publishers, 1998)PREFACE Wambaya is a non-Pama-Nyungan language originally spoken in the Barkly Tablelands region of the Northern Territory, Australia. There are perhaps 8 -10 fluent speakers remaining, most of whom live in Tennant Creek and Elliott ...
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ItemExtreme Morphological Shift: Verbal case in Kayardild( 2004-07)Kayardild and the other Tangkic languages of Northern Australia are well known for their typologically unusual and complex case systems (Evans (1995, 2003a), Dench and Evans (1988)). Their extensive case stacking properties, and their use of case to mark clausal tense/aspect/mood properties (so called `modal’ case (Evans 1995)) have received much attention in recent LFG literature (Andrews 1996, Nordlinger 1998, Nordlinger and Sadler 2000, Sadler and Nordlinger 2002). In this paper we discuss the phenomenon of ‘verbal case’ (Evans 1995, 2003b), as yet unaddressed in these theoretical accounts, by which nominals are inflected with an alternative set of semantic case markers causing them to inflect like verbs, while still functioning syntactically as nominals. The phenomenon of verbal case poses a number of challenges for theories of morphology and the morphology-syntax interface. We argue that it can be naturally captured in a theoretical model that assumes a strict separation of morphology and syntax, as in LFG. Building on much recent work in LFG-based morphology arguing for a distinction between morphological features (m-features) and syntactic features (s-features) (e.g. Sadler and Spencer 2001, Ackerman and Stump (in press), Sells (in press)), we propose that such a distinction is required at the categorical level also: verbal case converts a nominal stem into a morphological verb, while maintaining its syntactic category of noun. We show how this approach interacts with the constructive case model of Nordlinger (1998) to provide a unified account of Kayardild case at the morphosyntactic level, despite the substantial differences in morphological structure.
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ItemTetun Dili: A grammar of an East Timorese language.(Pacific Linguistics Publishers, 2002)
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ItemInfinitives in polysynthesis: the case of Rembarrnga(Akademie Verlag, 2002)
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ItemRelating Morphology to Syntax(CSLI Publications, 2004)
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ItemNo Preview AvailableNominal Tense in Crosslinguistic Perspective(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004)It is a general assumption in linguistic theory that the categories of tense, aspect, and mood (TAM) are inflectional categories of verbal classes only. In a number of languages around the world, however, nominals and other NP constituents are also inflected for these categories. In this article we provide a comprehensive survey of tense/aspect/mood marking on NP constituents across the world's languages. Two distinct types are identified: PROPOSITIONAL NOMINAL TAM, whereby the nominal carries TAM information relevant to the whole proposition, and INDEPENDENT NOMINAL TAM, in which the TAM information encoded on the nominal is relevant only to the NP on which it is markedÑindependent of the TAM of the clause as a whole. We illustrate these different types and their various properties using data from a wide range of languages showing that, while certainly unusual, the phenomenon of nominal tense/aspect/mood marking is far less marginal than is standardly assumed. Nominal TAM inflection must be accepted as a real possibility in universal grammatical structure, having significant implications for many aspects of linguistic theory.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableTense Beyond the Verb: Encoding Clausal Tense/Aspect/Mood on Nominal Dependents(Springer Science+Business Media, 2004)