Heather King

Intonation and word order in a 'non-configurational' language

Warlpiri is an Australian Aboriginal language with around 3000 speakers. It is spoken in the Tanami Desert region of Central Australia.

Warlpiri is considered to be a non-configurational language due to :

(1) its free word order at the clause level. There are few syntactic rules determining word order in Warlpiri apart from the position of the auxiliary (sentence-initial position or after the first constituent) and the position of interrogative words (almost always sentence-initial position).

(2) its use of syntactically discontinuous expressions. Two nominal (or verbal) elements forming a single expression may not necessarily occur in linearly adjacent positions, as illustrated in the following example ('that' and 'kangaroo' are at opposite ends of the sentence):

Wawirri kangaroo

kapi-rna AUX-1sgS

panti-rni spear-NONPAST

yalumpu that

'I will spear that kangaroo.'

and (3) its extensive use of null anaphora. This can be illustrated with the following example in which neither the subject nor the object arguments are represented by overt nominal expressions:

Panti-rni spear-NONPAST

ka AUX

'(He) is spearing (it).'

The thematic choices of the speaker, rather than syntactic rules, largely determine word order in Warlpiri with the sentence level topic being positioned in sentence-initial position.

What then is the role of the intonational system in this language? This paper will examine this question with F0 contours as illustration.

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