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Ilana Mushin

Motivations for second position: Evidence from North-Central Australia

Keywords: Australian languages, auxiliary, clitic, clitic cluster, cliticisation, focus, Garrwa, grammaticalisation, information packaging, pronoun, second position, tense-aspect-modality, Wambaya, Warlpiri, word order

It has long been observed that many languages from all over the world require that certain grammatical categories (e.g., person, number, tense, modality) occur in the “second position” of a clause. Much of the research into second position has developed formal explanations for this recurring pattern, based on interactions between morphosyntax and phonology. In this article I explore how pragmatics of information packaging interacts with these other features in the development of such morphosyntactic architecture in three North-Central Australian languages: Warlpiri, Wambaya, and Garrwa.

Linguistic Typology, Walter de Gruyter

Print ISSN: 1430-0532
Volume: 10, 12/2006
Pages: 287 - 326

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