School of Languages and Linguistics - Theses
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ItemReferential Choice in Pitjantjatjara( 2023)This thesis investigates how speakers choose between different referential forms (lexical noun phrases, pronouns, and argument omission) in The Australian language Pitjantjatjara. Five Pitjantjatjara narratives are explored from an extensive corpus collected by Sasha Wilmoth during fieldwork. This thesis is guided by the theory of Preferred Argument Structure (PAS), a theory about the pattern of alignment of referential forms in particular grammatical roles. It is also guided by a body of literature on argument expression and referential choice, discussed in chapter 2. This thesis adopts two primary Research Questions, the first considering the syntactic factors influencing argument expression in Pitjantjatjara, and the second similarly considering the effects of semantic and discourse factors. Chapter 3 outlines how the coding of the data was approached, and the choices that were made with respect to the analysis of the data. The results are presented in chapter 4, first addressing the two Research Questions separately, then cross-analysing them to determine potential interactions between the relevant factors. The results were both consistent and different from the literature. As expected, humanness was a highly influential factor in the choice of referential form in Pitjantjatjara; human referents patterned differently to non-human referents with respect to their referential form. However, this study departs from prior work in that in Pitjantjatjara, free pronouns were found to be preferred over argument omission, especially when continuing referents through discourse. This contradicts the findings of several previous studies, especially on Australian languages, where null reference was posited to be the most popular method of signalling the continuation of a referent in a narrative.