Nunggubuyu

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.

This thesis is an examination of a number of related morphosyntactic constructions in Wubuy (formerly named ‘Nunggubuyu’ by Heath (1984)), a polysynthetic Gunwinyguan language from south-east Arnhem Land. In particular, focus is placed on possessive constructions and how these interact with other areas of the morpho-syntax, such as verbal agreement and noun incorporation. Additionally, this thesis separates Wubuy possessive constructions from possessive interpretations of benefactive applicatives. In Wubuy, possession behaves in a way that is reminiscent of ‘external possession’, or ‘possessor raising’, constructions (B. Baker, et al. 2010; M. Baker 1996; Payne and Barshi 1999a). However, empirical data demonstrates that current typologies and formal analyses of EP and NI cannot adequately account for all of Wubuy’s possessive mechanisms. This thesis will outline why these accounts are unsatisfactory, and it will suggest a new classification of Wubuy’s possessive constructions that is more successful in capturing the intrinsic grammatical and semantic contrast between different types of possession. A possible avenue for the development of a new approach to Wubuy possessive constructions within the framework of Lexical Functional Grammar (Lødrup 2009; Nordlinger and Sadler 2008; Schrock 2007) will also be proposed. Data is taken from a variety of sources, including my own fieldwork with speakers.

Causation is usually described as consisting of two main types: direct and indirect causation. These are often conceptualised as the poles of a semantic continuum, and crosslinguistically, this semantic continuum reflects a pattern of grammaticalisation/lexicalisation (Shibatani 1976, c.f. Comrie 1981, Shibatani and Pardeshi 2001). However, this tendency has received little attention within the Australian context, where the focus has been on morphological causative forms. I begin to address this gap by considering how both morphological and syntactic methods are used to express causation in Wubuy, a language from northern Australia. I find that direct causation can generally be expressed via morphological derivational processes, whereas indirect causation cannot. When the causation is indirect, Wubuy speakers favour a syntactic construction that has never before been described for this language and which is also typologically uncommon for Australian languages more generally: indirect speech. This both contradicts Heath’s (1984: 559) claim that Wubuy has no indirect speech construction and supports the crosslinguistic generalisations in the literature.

In this paper we examine the interaction of a number of grammatical phenomena in Wubuy, a polysynthetic language from northern Australia, and show how they can be given a comprehensive analysis within the framework of LFG. While each of these phenomena–noun incorporation, verbal agreement, coordination and external possession–has received various treatments within the LFG literature, no one study has addressed the compatibility of these analyses under interaction, despite the fact that they frequently co-occur in the ...

Causation is often acknowledged as a fundamental cognitive category, as “every human language seems to possess a means of expressing the notion of causation” (Shibatani, 2001, p. 1). However, although languages around the world employ a range of different methods to express causation, the majority of linguistic research on this topic has been concerned with morphological causative forms, often with little (if any) consideration to whether or not a given language also utilises syntactic strategies (Song, 2013). This can be seen when looking at descriptions of Australian languages, where the focus is predominantly on morphological causatives, with syntactic causatives being either typologically rare, or rarely discussed. In this seminar, I use Wubuy, an Australian language from south‐east Arnhem Land, as a case study to demonstrate that extending our investigation of causative expressions to include syntactic forms can lead to the discovery of constructions that have hitherto remained undescribed. For Wubuy, this approach has recently led to the documentation and description of indirect speech, which is another type of construction that is either typologically uncommon for Australian languages or neglected in the literature. 

Extract from abstract: Possession is generally divided into two semantic types: inalienable and alienable. While inalienability signals “an indissoluble connection between two entities”, alienability encompasses “relationships of a less permanent and inherent type” (Chappell & McGregor 1995:4). For most Australian languages, the distinction between these semantic categories is reflected in the distribution of grammatical constructions that express possession. Alienable relationships are generally expressed with an Internal Possessor Construction (IPC) that codes the possessor as a modifier of the possessum, whereas inalienable relationships are commonly expressed with an External Possessor Construction (EPC) that treats the possessor as an argument of the clause (Dixon 2002:138; Meakins & Nordlinger 2014:205-206; Morphy 1983:122). However, Wubuy, (a.k.a. Nunggubuyu (Heath, 1984)), a polysynthetic head-marking language from South- East Arnhem Land, does not follow this typological tendency. This paper shows that it is within the domain of external possession that alienability affects the distribution of Wubuy possessive constructions, and when speakers wish to highlight the affectedness of an alienable possessor, they use the benefactive in a way that has not been identified by previous work on the language.