Morphotactic variation, prosodic domains and the changing structure of the Murrinhpatha verb
33
1 Morphotactic variation, prosodic domains and the changing structure of the Murrinhpatha verb John Mansfield [email protected] School of Languages and Linguistics University of Melbourne Parkville, Victoria 3010 Australia
Transcript of Morphotactic variation, prosodic domains and the changing structure of the Murrinhpatha verb
1
Morphotactic variation, prosodic domains and the
changing structure of the Murrinhpatha verb John Mansfield [email protected] School of Languages and Linguistics University of Melbourne Parkville, Victoria 3010 Australia
2
Morphotactic variation, prosodic domains and the
changing structure of the Murrinhpatha verb
Abstract
Bound morphology is usually realized on lexical stems following fixed rules of
sequencing, but in some morphologically complex languages this is not the case.
Morphotactic variation has previously been described in detail for Chintang and
Tagalog, and more briefly noted for various other languages including Udi,
Totonac and Athapaskan languages (Bickel et al., 2007; Harris, 2002; McFarland,
2009; Rice, 2000; Ryan, 2010). I here report another case of variable ordering, in
Murrinhpatha, an Aboriginal language of northern Australia. I argue that in this
case the variable ordering of verb suffixes reflects change in progress in the
morphological structure of the verb, and the dynamic nature of prosodic
domains in this language. I also note that in Chintang, Udi and Murrinhpatha,
morphotactic variation is associated with word-‐like prosodic domains occurring
inside the syntactic verbal word.
La morfología dependiente suele ser realizada en raíces léxicas siguiendo reglas
fijas de secuencia, pero en algunos idiomas con morfología compleja este no es el
caso. La variación morfotáctica ha sido documentada en chintang y tagalog, y
observada en otros idiomas como udi, totonac y lenguas atabascas (Bickel et al.,
2007; Harris, 2002; McFarland, 2009; Rice, 2000; Ryan, 2010). En este artículo
describo otro caso de secuencia variable en murrinhpatha, un idioma aborigen
del norte de Australia. Propongo que en este caso la secuencia variable de sufijos
en el verbo refleja un cambio histórico en la estructura morfosintáctica del verbo
y el carácter dinámico de dominios prosódicos en este idioma. Observo además
que en chintang, udi y murrinhpatha, la variación morfotáctica está asociada a
dominios prosódicos que aparecen dentro de la palabra sintáctica.
3
Keywords
Morphology; Morphotactics; Linguistic variation; Word structure; Prosodic
domains; Templatic morphology
Morfología; Morfotáctica; Variación lingüística; Estructura de la palabra;
Dominios prosódicos; Morfología templática
1. Introduction
Morphotactic variation – i.e. variation of morphological sequencing that has no
effect on the meaning of the word – appears to be a somewhat rare phenomenon
in languages of the world, having previously been described in detail for only a
handful of languages, most notably Chintang (Bickel et al., 2007) and Tagalog
(Ryan, 2010). In this article I present further evidence on morphotactic variation,
exploring its association with word-‐internal prosodic boundaries in Chintang,
Udi, and in a new case that I report for Murrinhpatha. For the latter I present
evidence of inter-‐speaker variation, which has not been available for any
previously documented case of morphotactic variation. This shows that in
Murrinhpatha the variable positioning of the tense suffix is associated with the
age of the speaker. Drawing on this and other evidence, I argue that
morphotactic variation in Murrinhpatha reflects change in progress in the
structure of the verbal word.
Murrinhpatha is a morphologically complex language of northern Australia,
where morphotactic variation is manifest in the position of past or future tense
suffixes (TENSE), which can occur in one of three positions with respect to
number (NUM) and imperfective markers (IMPF), without affecting in any way
their tense/aspect function:
4
(1) purdene-‐yitj-‐dha-‐nime=pardi 3PAUC.TURN.PST-‐explain-‐PST-‐PAUC.M=BE.SER1 {-‐TENSE-‐NUM-‐IMPF} they were explaining it (2013-‐11_EM)2
(2) parde-‐kut-‐nime-‐dha=pardi 3PAUC.BE.PST-‐collect-‐PAUC.M-‐PST=BE.SER {-‐NUM-‐TENSE-‐IMPF} they were collecting it (2013-‐11_LP)
(3) pube-‐rtal-‐rtal-‐nime=pardi-‐dha 3PAUC.BASH.PST-‐chop-‐RDP-‐PAUC.M=BE.SER-‐PST {-‐NUM-‐IMPF-‐TENSE} they were chopping (wood) (2013-‐01_DP)
These examples show the three attested positions of TENSE with three different
verbs, which therefore leaves open the possibility that the variation is lexically
determined. However we will see below that there are no such lexical patterns.
Distinct verbs are here exemplified only so as to illustrate the point using forms
produced by native speakers, rather than grammaticality judgements.
Murrinhpatha is spoken by about 3000 Aboriginal people in and around the
town of Wadeye in northern Australia. It is unusual among Australian Aboriginal
languages in that its speaker numbers have grown since contact with Europeans,
while so many other languages have become endangered or ceased to be spoken
(Evans, 2007). This is partly due to the fact that a range of other language groups
shifted to Murrinhpatha in the mid-‐twentieth century, when they settled the
Catholic Mission at Wadeye, sited on Murrinhpatha land. Some seven language
groups settled the mission, and Murrinhpatha speakers only made up about one
third of this population, alongside people from Marri Ngarr, Marri Tjevin,
Jaminjung and several other language groups (Falkes, Docherty, & Gsell, 1939).
Acting in accordance with the Aboriginal ideal that each place has its proper
language, within a few decades of mission settlement all Aboriginal residents had
shifted to raising their children as Murrinhpatha speakers (Mansfield, 2014, pp.
90–100). This historical background is important, since it is possible that the
5
recent intensity of language contact at Wadeye has played a role in the variation
and change discussed here – though at this stage I do not have the necessary data
to confirm or refute this hypothesis.
In this article I provide a detailed description of variable TENSE morphotactics in
Murrinhpatha, in the first place because this type of variation has still been only
very sparsely documented. The most detailed descriptions previously available
are for Chintang (Bickel et al., 2007) and Tagalog (Ryan, 2010), and there are no
previous descriptions at all that show a relationship between social
characteristics of the speaker and realization of the variable. Previous work has
investigated the social and diachronic structure of other types of
morphosyntactic variation, such as paradigmatic inflectional variables (Poplack,
2001; Walker, 2010a), pronominal agreement (Meyerhoff, 2013; Travis & Torres
Cacoullos, 2012) and copula expression (Rickford, Ball, Blake, Jackson, & Martin,
1991).
The organisation of the article is as follows: section §2 defines “morphotactic
variation”, and reviews the evidence presented in previous literature; section §3
briefly introduces the structure of the Murrinhpatha verbs; section §4 describes
morphotactic variation in the Murrinhpatha verb, as well as related phonological
variation; section §5 provides quantitative analysis of the variation, from which
an argument for change in progress is adduced.
2. Morphotactic variation
Bound morphology is usually considered to be highly rigid in its ordering, in
contrast to the more flexible syntactic ordering of independent words (Bickel &
Nichols, 2007; Dixon, 2002). However there are some exceptions to this
generalization, which I label “morphotactic variation”. I define this to be
whenever bound morphology can be sequenced in more than one way, without
resulting in any change of meaning. It is therefore distinct from cases such as
Adyghe (Korotkova & Lander, 2010), where different affix orders result in subtly
6
different meanings, especially differences relating to scope. Bonami and
Crysmann (2013) label these two types of cases “free reordering” and “positional
disambiguation” respectively – though like most sociolinguists (e.g. Walker,
2010b), I avoid describing variation as “free”, since this elides the possibility of
conditioning factors that have a stochastic, rather than categorical, influence on
the realization of forms.
Morphotactic variation has been described at various levels of detail for a range
of languages including Madurese (Stevens, 1971), Nhanda (Blevins, 2001, pp. 60,
119), Udi (Harris, 2002), Chintang (Bickel et al., 2007), Totonac (McFarland,
2009, pp. 205–221) and various Athapaskan languages (Rice, 2000, pp. 81, 101).
Most instances of morphotactic variation are given only a brief mention, without
any analysis of how this variability might relate to word structure. A fairly
typical example can be seen in the description of the northern Australian
language Rembarrnga, where it is succinctly stated that the suffix -‐ngereʔ
(“only”) and the various case suffixes “have been found to co-‐occur in either
order” (McKay, 1975, p. 92). The brevity of such documentation makes it difficult
to develop an overview of exactly how rare or how common morphotactic
variation might be, what other phenomena it might correspond with, and within
what limits it occurs.
A detailed study of morphotactic variation in Tagalog (Ryan, 2010) uses a web-‐
based corpus to investigate the quantitative distribution of variable sequences,
and shows how these can be modelled as a grid of differently weighted bindings
between pairs of morphemes. However the Tagalog study does not include
discussion of prosodic domains, or of inter-‐speaker variation, making it less
relevant to the Murrinhpatha data presented here. More pertinent is a slightly
earlier study of morphotactic variation, in Chintang (Bickel et al., 2007).
Chintang has a morphologically complex, templatic verb in which subject and
object agreement markers, as well as a negator, are marked as prefixes with
variable ordering. Between the three morphological classes all six logically
possible sequences are attested:
7
(4) u-‐kha-‐ma-‐cop-‐yokt-‐e 3NS.A-‐1NS.P-‐NEG-‐see-‐NEG-‐PST {Subject-‐Object-‐Negator} they didn’t see us (Bickel et al., 2007, p. 44)
But also…
Subject-‐Negator-‐Object Object-‐Subject-‐Negator Object-‐Negator-‐Subject Negator-‐Subject-‐Object Negator-‐Object-‐Subject
There is no indication that these sequences differ in meaning. By all syntactic
tests these are inflectional morphs, but phonologically they are somewhat
loosely bound. The prosodic domain in which stress is assigned (ω1)
encompasses the entire verb, of which these morphs are dependent parts. But
there is a lower level of prosodic grouping (ω2) marked by left-‐edge glottal stop
insertion, and on this level each prefix projects its own domain.
(4) u-‐kha-‐ma-‐cop-‐yokt-‐e [[3NS.A]W2-‐[1NS.P]W2-‐[NEG]W2-‐[see-‐NEG-‐PST]W2]W1 they didn’t see us
Other word classes in Chintang all form single ω2 units, so it has something of a
“word-‐like” character. Verb suffixes, which do not show variable ordering, are
dependent parts of the ω2 headed by the verb stem; so the verb prefixes are
unusual both in their variable ordering, and in their projection of the ω2 domain
inside a syntactic word. The ω2 domain is also distinguished as the host unit for
“endoclitic” focus markers: morphs which have the mobile attachment of clitics,
but in some instances appear inside affixal morphology (Harris, 2002). In
summary, Chintang exhibits something of a mismatch between its syntactic
dependencies (according to which the verb is a single word), and its prosodic
dependencies (in which most words form a single ω2, but the verb is made up of
several ω2s).
8
Bickel et al argue that it is the independent ω2 domains of Chintang prefixes that
permit variable prefix ordering. Prefixes attach to the left of a ω2 unit, but with
multiple such units present in the prefixed verb, variation is facilitated by the
multiple available anchor points. Figure 1 schematically represents the affixation
of a third prefix to a Chintang verb, with three possible ω2 units hosting the affix,
leading to three possible sequential positions.
Figure 1. Schematic model of variable prefix positioning in Chintang
Bickel et al do not extensively discuss variation in the phonological realization of
the ω2 boundary, but do comment in passing that this boundary, defined by the
appearance of a glottal stop in the absence of any other stop at the left edge,
disappears in rapid speech (Bickel et al., 2007, p. 56). The prosodic domain
boundary according to which Chintang prefixes are located is therefore not
altogether consistent in its scope, but rather shows some flexibility, at least
between different speeds or registers of speech. We will see later that this type
of phonological variation, associated with the same prosodic juncture as the
morphotactic variation, also appears in Murrinhpatha.
Bickel et al’s corpus provides 58 instances in which negation and person
agreement markers combine, representing five different speakers with between
four and 14 tokens each. In this sample they find an almost even 50/50 split
between PERS-‐NEG and NEG-‐PERS ordering, and no correlation to the individual
speaker, their family or their dialect. Four of the five speakers use both possible
orderings. The data does suggest that there may be some priming effect,
whereby speakers tend to mimic the ordering used by their interlocutor. Bickel
9
et al observe that further predictive effects may be identifiable, but would
require a far larger corpus (Bickel et al., 2007, p. 65).
In Chintang both the variable ordering of prefixes, and the appearance of
endoclitics, hinge on the fact that there are word-‐like prosodic boundaries inside
the verb. It is interesting to note that in Udi, a Caucasian language for which the
phenomenon of endoclisis has been more thoroughly explored (Harris, 2002),
the endoclitics again appear at a morphological juncture where a word-‐like
prosodic boundary may be realized. Udi has person agreement clitics that attach
to the verb in either an enclitic position at the right edge of the whole verb + affix
complex (5), or an endoclitic position that splits a complex verb or bipartite verb
stem (6).
(5) be-‐ɣ-‐sa=ne watch-‐watch-‐PRES=3SG she watches
(6) be-‐ne-‐ɣ-‐sa watch-‐3SG-‐watch-‐PRES she watches (Harris, 2002, pp. 136–8)
There is some evidence that the juncture between verbal stem elements, where
the endoclitic may appear, is variably realized with a word-‐like prosodic
boundary. In particular, there is a vowel syncope rule that affects certain suffixes
when they are preceded by a VC sequence within the same word. This rule
sometimes behaves as if the verb complex were a single word (7), and
sometimes as if it were two words (8).
VOWEL SYNCOPE
esV → SV / VC + __
(7) hünạr-‐ru-‐b-‐esa → /hünạrrubsa/ heroic.deeds-‐2SG-‐do-‐PRES you do heroic deeds
10
(8) hünạr-‐ru#b-‐esa → /hünạrrubesa/ heroic.deeds-‐2SG#do-‐PRES you do heroic deeds (Harris, 2002, p. 83; citing Bezanov, 1888)
In (7) the application of vowel syncope, /esa/ → /sa/, implies that the preceding
/ub/ sequence is part of the same word domain; but in (8) the non-‐application of
the rule implies that there is a word-‐boundary between hünạr-‐ru and b-‐esa.
Harris does not explicitly associate Udi morphotactic variation with prosodic
domains, but nonetheless the variable position of the agreement marker does
appear, like Chintang prefixes, to depend upon the availability of multiple
prosodic anchor points. Morphotactic variation has not been considered as
noteworthy in Udi, because the variably positioned element is a more
independent clitic, rather than an affix. Variable clitic positioning is well known
from major cosmopolitan languages such as Portuguese (Aikhenvald, 2002, p.
44). But the difference between Chintang and Udi is perhaps a matter of degree:
the Chintang “prefixes” are also somewhat clitic-‐like, in the very fact that they
attach to a prosodic anchor point; while the Udi “clitics” are somewhat affix-‐like,
in that they can occur inside of affixal morphology. These cases may even suggest
that a clear universal distinction between affixes and clitics is unsustainable, just
as the concept of a universally defined word unit has been argued to be
unsustainable (Haspelmath, 2011; Schiering, Bickel, & Hildebrandt, 2010).
In summary, Chintang and Udi both have variable morphotactics, apparently
facilitated by word-‐like prosodic domains inside the verb. In the following
section we will see that a very similar type of variable morphological ordering
occurs in Murrinhpatha, and in section §4 we will see that in Murrinhpatha,
speech type and speaker age both have a clear influence on the selection of
sequencing variants. Together with archival and contextual evidence this
suggests that in Murrinhpatha a change in progress is underway.
11
3. The Murrinhpatha verb
The Murrinhpatha verb has a templatic structure built around two core
elements, an inflecting classifier stem and an uninflecting lexical stem, which are
not always contiguous (Nordlinger, 2010). In some instances these two elements
have clearly compositional semantics:
(9) mungam-‐parl 3SG.HANDS-‐break {CLASSIFIER-‐Lexical} he broke it off
(10) dim-‐parl 3SG.SIT-‐break it’s broken (Street, 2012, p. -‐parl)
(11) bangam-‐rtal
1SG.BASH-‐chop
he chopped it (with an axe)
(12) pan-‐rtal
1SG.SLASH-‐chop
he sliced it (with a knife) (Nordlinger & Caudal, 2012, p. 76)
In cases such as (9–12), the lexical stem defines a core lexical predicate, and the
classifier modifies the motion vector, transitivity or Aktionsart of that predicate,
echoing a pattern that is common across northwestern Australia (McGregor,
2002). There are, however, other instances where the combination of classifier
and lexical stems is more or less lexicalised.
The combination of classifier stem and lexical stem, with various intervening
morphological positions, is where the main predicational meaning is encoded in
a Murrinhpatha verb. But the morphology with which this article is concerned
occurs to the right of the bipartite stem sequence. This suffix sequence (Figure 2)
consists of tense and number markers, as well as a second “serial classifier” that
12
can be encliticized to the right edge of the verb to indicate imperfective aspect.
Mobile adverbial elements can also be incorporated, either before or after a
number suffix. Since these occur elsewhere as enclitics on any constituent, I
characterise their occurrence inside the verb’s inflectional morphology as
another instance of endoclisis.
(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9) Classifier stem (with fused subject) pers/num and TAM)
Object pron, Subj number
Reflexive/ reciprocal
Incorporated body part, Applicative
Lexical stem
Tense Argument number, Adverbial
= Imperfective (serial classifier)
Stem sequence Suffix sequence Figure 2. The Murrinh Patha verb template (Nordlinger, 2010)
Figure 2 illustrates the morphological structure of the verb, as attested in
previous grammatical descriptions of Murrinhpatha (Blythe, 2009; Nordlinger,
2010; Street, 1987; Walsh, 1976). This template was established through
fieldwork with some 15–20 speakers, most of whom were born in the first half of
the twentieth century (hence-‐forth, “mission-‐era speakers”).
Murrinhpatha is spoken at the northern reaches of a large geographic area in
which most languages are characterised by phrasal verbs combining an
inflecting light verb and an uninflecting coverb (McGregor, 2002). In most of
these languages the two elements are separate syntactic and phonological words
(e.g. Warlpiri (Nash, 1982), Bardi (Bowern, 2004, pp. 277–288)), but in some
Daly languages, such as Murrinhpatha and Marrithiyel (Green, 1989), they are
fused into a single word. The bipartite stem structure of the contemporary
Murrinhpatha verb is therefore the result of an earlier two-‐word structure, and
this fusion explains the apparently arbitrary morphological ordering in the
contemporary verbal template. Note for example that subject number markers
occur either in slot 2 or in slot 7–8, depending on rules of combination with
other morphs (Blythe, 2010; Nordlinger, 2010, pp. 337–8). For Murrinhpatha’s
sister language Ngan’gi the fusion of the two stem elements has only become
categorical in the last 60 years (Reid, 2003), and for Murrinhpatha there is also
13
some lexical evidence that the fusion process has been quite recent (Mansfield,
2015).
3.1 Phonological and syntactic unity of the verb
The Murrinhpatha verb is syntactically unified in the sense that most lexical
stems cannot occur without the classifier and its associated affixes, and because
the order of classifier, lexical stem, and most other morphs is rigidly fixed – the
main exceptions being those described in this article. Most lexical stems are not
recognised by speakers as valid independent words. In terms of prosodic
binding, we must draw a distinction between outer and inner domains in the
verb, which I label ω1 and ω2 respectively, in analogy with Bickel’s Chintang
domains. The smaller ω2 domain extends from the classifier in slot 1 to the
lexical stem in slot 5, while the morphs to the right of this – i.e. those that will be
shown to have variable ordering – form separate ω2 units that together make up
a phrase-‐like ω1 domain (Figure 3).3
(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9) Classifier stem
Object pron, Subj number
Reflexive/ reciprocal
Incorporated body part, Applicative
Verb root Tense Argument number, Adverbial
= Imperfective
Stem sequence Suffix sequence ω2 ω2 ω2 ω2
ω1 Figure 3. Prosodic domains in yhe Murrinh Patha verb template
These two domains are defined by stress placement, a minimum quantity rule
for the stem ω2, and various segmental assimilations at morphological
boundaries. For example a REGRESSIVE NASAL PLACE ASSIMILATION rule affects /m/ at
morphological boundaries that are internal to ω2, but not those that are external
to ω2:
REGRESSIVE NASAL PLACE ASSIMILATION OF /m/
/m/ → [CORONAL] / __ [CORONAL +OBSTRUENT]
14
(13) [ŋam-‐d̪ap]W2 → /ŋan̪d̪ap/ [1SG.POKE-‐shut]W2 I closed it (Street 2012: -‐dhap)
(14) [kaɖi-‐kum-‐kum]W2-‐d̪a]W1 → /kaɖikumkumd̪a/ [3SG.BE.PST-‐swim-‐RDP]W2-‐PST]W1 he was swimming (Street 2012: -‐kum)
In example (13), /m/ is adjacent to the coronal consonant /d̪/ across a ω2-‐
internal morpheme boundary, and provokes a place assimilation. In (14) the
same segmental adjacency occurs across a boundary external to ω2, and the
assimilation does not occur.
The minimum quantity rule requires two morae to form a ω2, so that a
monosyllabic /CV/ verb classifier such as tji (2S.SIT.IRR) must have its vowel
lengthened when it stands alone in the ω2 domain.4
(15) nyinyi kardu binyi=warda [[tji]W2-‐nu]W1 → /ciːnu/
2SG PERSON whole=IMM [[2SG.SIT.FUT]]W2-‐FUT]W1
you’ll be okay then (Walsh 1986: Tape 57)
(16) nyinyi [[tji-‐kampa]W2-‐nu]W1 → /cigambanu/
2SG [[2SG.SIT.FUT-‐laugh]W2-‐FUT]W1
you will laugh (2013-‐01_SJ)
In example (15) tji alone forms a ω2, so its vowel must be lengthened to satisfy
the bimoraic minimum quantity. But in example (16) it shares the domain with
the lexical stem -‐kampa, so lengthening does not occur.
Stress assignment in Murrinhpatha words is calculated from the right edge of the
stem ω2, falling on either the first syllable of the right-‐most stem morph (usually
the lexical stem), or if that morpheme is monosyllabic, on the first syllable of a
preceding morph:
15
(17) [panam-‐kampa]W2 → /pa nam ˈkam pa/ [3PL.BE-‐laugh]W2 they (plural) are laughing
(18) [bangam-‐dhawi-‐bu]W2 → /ba ŋan ˈd̪a wi bu/ [3SG.STRIKE-‐mouth-‐ignite]W2 he lit up (a cigarette)
(19) [[pibim-‐ka-‐kampa]W2 -‐nime]W1 → /pi bim ka ˈkam pa ni me/ [[3PL.STAND-‐PAUC-‐laugh]W2 -‐PAUC.M]W1 they (paucal) are laughing
In all examples (17–19), stress is assigned from the right edge of ω2. In (19)
there is an additional suffix falling outside this domain, but it has no effect on the
assignment of the stress.5
The “serial classifier” of slot 9 is a second classifier stem, which can only be one
of seven intransitive classifiers that all reference stance when used alone, e.g.
pirrim “it stands”. As serial classifiers they mark imperfective aspect (Mansfield,
2014, p. 423; Nordlinger & Caudal, 2012). They are labelled enclitics by both
Blythe (2009: 128–134) and Nordlinger and Caudal (2012, pp. 87–89),
presumably because they are usually pronounced pauselessly after the main
verb and lack word-‐like stress. On the other hand, it should be noted that they
can be pronounced with both a preceding pause, and their own stress, especially
in careful speech. The serial classifier is thus rather loosely bound by prosodic
diagnostics, but is nonetheless quite tightly bound syntactically in terms of
position and functional dependency. In the discussion of variation below we will
see that serial classifiers show some signs of increased binding to the verbal
word.
4. Morphotactic variation in contemporary youth speech
I have conducted Murrinhpatha fieldwork since 2011, focusing on the speech of
young men aged 18–40, who encompass an emically defined age-‐grade, kardu
16
kigay (person youth). The speech of contemporary kigay does not consistently
follow the templatic sequence described in the previous section, but instead
shows substantial morphotactic variation in the suffix sequence. Local cultural
protocols have prevented me from working with young women, so the claims in
this article all draw specifically on speech data from young men, though I do not
expect that this variation will exhibit an association with speaker gender.
The endoclitic adverbs attested in earlier Murrinhpatha data (i.e. clitics
appearing inside of affixal morphology) occur only as enclitics in kigay speech
data, and play no part in this discussion of morphotactic variation. This leaves
three morphological classes to potentially occur in the suffix sequence – tense
(TENSE), argument number (NUM), and serial classifiers marking imperfective
aspect (IMPF) – and as noted in the introduction, these appear in a range of
sequences that fully or partially instantiate the following configurations:
-‐TENSE-‐NUM-‐IMPF (as in earlier descriptions, Figure 3) -‐NUM-‐TENSE-‐IMPF (innovative) -‐NUM-‐IMPF-‐TENSE (innovative)
The relative ordering of NUM and IMPF remains as in the earlier data, but TENSE
appears in two previously unattested positions, either to the right of NUM, or to
the right of both NUM and IMPF. The position of TENSE therefore seems to be the
key to the variable sequence. Furthermore, since TENSE attaches at the right edge
of the stem ω2 domain in the previously attested template, we should ask
whether its variable shift to the right reflects variable expansion of the stem ω2.
There is indeed some phonological evidence for such an expansion, as well as
signs that IMPF is proceeding down a grammaticalization path from independent
word to bound suffix.
4.1 Variable expansion of the stem ω2 domain
Evidence for expansion of the stem ω2 is found where morpho-‐phonological
assimilations characteristic of ω2 apply variably at the juncture of stem and IMPF,
17
with progressive assimilations affecting IMPF itself (20–21) and regressive
assimilations affecting stem morphs (22).
(20) siksak mam=wurran → /mampuɾan/ zigzag 3SG.DO=GO.SER{IMPF} it (a river) goes in a zig-‐zag shape (2013-‐01_DP)
(21) bangam-‐rtartal=dim → /baŋaɳʈaʈallim/ 3SG.BASH-‐chop.RDP=SIT.SER he’s chopping (wood) (2013-‐01_NP)
(22) thingk mam=dim → /mandim/ think 3SG.DO=SIT.SER he’s thinking (2013-‐01_OB)
Unfortunately the number of verbs in the kigay speech data for which morpho-‐
phonological alternations characteristic of ω2 might apply to IMPF are too few to
support quantitative analysis.6 But grammaticalization of IMPF is also suggested
by phonological reduction, which is elsewhere documented in the
grammaticalization of verbs becoming affixes (Hopper & Traugott, 2003, p. 111).
For IMPF this is realised as erosion of the initial consonant (23), or the entire first
syllable (24–25), which incidentally incurs no loss of information, since the
initial consonant always agrees with the person/number marking of the main
verb, and is therefore redundant. This occurs in about half of the IMPF marked
verbs in verb conjugations elicited from kigay, though again there is insufficient
data for the quantitative analysis of conditioning factors.
(23) nganki ngiyema-‐kani → /ŋanki ŋijemaani/ 1PL 1PL.do.IRR-‐IMPF.IRR we’ll be doing it (2013-‐01_KM)
(24) wilili nungam-‐lili-‐kanam → /wilili nuŋamlilinam/ walk 3SG.FEET-‐walk-‐IMPF.NFUT he’s walking (2013-‐01_KN)
18
(25) me-‐watha-‐dha-‐kardi → /mewat̪ad̪aɖi/ 3S.HANDS.PST-‐fix-‐PST-‐IMPF.PST he was fixing it (2013-‐01_SJ)
Evidence of the morpho-‐phonological type cannot be adduced for NUM, the
segmental form of which does not lend itself to assimilatory processes. Neither is
there evidence of ω2 expansion in terms of stress placement or satisfaction of
the bimoraic word minimum. That is to say, we do not find stress shifts of the
type [[pu mam ˈka puɭ]W2 ni me]W1 → [[pu mam ka puɭ ˈni me]W2]W1, nor broader
bimoraic satisfaction such as [[ciː]W2 nu]W1→ [[cinu]W2]W1. However one final
piece of evidence we may adduce suggesting tighter binding of both NUM and IMPF
is the obsolescence of adverbial endoclitics, as mentioned above. The fact that
these could occur inside of NUM and IMPF in earlier data suggested that the right
margin of the verbal word could still be located to the left of NUM and IMPF;
conversely the absence of adverbial endoclitics in contemporary kigay speech
suggests firmer unity in the verbal word.
In summary, IMPF variably shows some signs of being more tightly bound to the
verbal word than it was in the earlier attested grammar. For NUM similar
evidence is not available, though in any case NUM is positioned closer to the stem.
4.2 Tense suffixes occasionally behave like clitics
There are two other dimensions of variability in the verb morphosyntax that
deserve brief mention. The first is whether the suffixes are realized at all: TENSE,
and occasionally NUM, are sometimes absent in environments where they would
be expected. I do not describe the details here (but see Mansfield, 2014, pp. 368–
371), since the very absence of the suffixes precludes the phenomenon from
shedding any light on the variable sequencing that is the focus of this article.
Furthermore, I do not regard the variable absence of suffixes as part of the
morphosyntactic change in progress.7
A second, rare variable, is the appearance of TENSE on constituents other than the
verb. Although TENSE has been described thus far as a “suffix”, it does
19
occasionally exhibit more clitic-‐like behaviour. It has been previously described
as a suffix in Murrinhpatha grammar because it is almost always attached to the
verb, for which it has an inflectional function (Nordlinger & Caudal, 2012; Street,
1987; Walsh, 1976). But there are a very few instances (about half-‐a-‐dozen in
almost 10 hours of Murrinhpatha speech I have transcribed so far) where it
attaches to both words in a verbal phrase:
(26) nakurl-‐nu ngi-‐tjek-‐nu later-‐FUT 1SG.SIT.IRR-‐shit-‐FUT I’ll shit later (2013-‐01_SbM)
(27) kunginire-‐dha kardi-‐kum-‐kum-‐dha yesterday-‐PST 3SG.BE.PST-‐swim-‐RDP-‐PST yesterday he went swimming (2013-‐01_JL)
This behaviour occurs too rarely to warrant the classification of TENSE as a clitic.
However it is interesting to note, as it adds to the picture of this morphological
class as a fairly mobile one, only loosely bound to words. It also draws an
interesting comparison to Chintang and Udi, where we have seen that variably
sequenced morphs exhibit somewhat “mixed” behaviour between affixal and
clitic types.
4.3 Variation in older speech data
I have here contrasted the variability found in kigay data against apparently
invariant forms described in previous literature; however, exploration of
archival recordings has shown that there certainly was some degree of variation
among speakers born earlier, though it was probably less extensive. In
particular, the -‐NUM-‐TENSE ordering, though unattested in any of the grammatical
descriptions, does occasionally appear in the recordings of mission-‐era speakers:
(28) nantji=kama pi-‐wurrpurrk-‐neme-‐nu=warda le patha pi-‐neme-‐nu
THING=maybe 1INCL-‐dance-‐PAUC.M-‐FUT=IMM happy 1INCL.SIT-‐PAUC.M-‐FUT
let's party! (WAVA 2000-‐11-‐20)
20
However I have only identified Mission-‐era NUM-‐TENSE ordering occurring for the
future -‐nu suffix, and not for both future and past as in contemporary youth
speech.
Though there was clearly some variation of suffix structure in Mission-‐era
Murrinhpatha, there appears to have been a much clearer preference for a
standard sequence among these speakers. In Le Page and Tabouret-‐Keller’s
(1985) terms, the suffix structure was previously more “focused” on a particular
sequence (leading field linguists to describe a categorical rule), while in
contemporary youth speech the variability of the sequence has become strikingly
“diffuse”. None of the earlier descriptions of Murrinhpatha verb morphosyntax
note any variation in the ordering of these suffixes (Blythe, 2009, pp. 118–140;
Nordlinger, 2010; Street, 1987; Walsh, 1976), and it seems implausible that the
diffuse variation found among contemporary youth speakers could have been
present at that stage, but gone unnoticed. Between Walsh, Street, Nordlinger and
Blythe, at least 15–20 speakers are documented, but all descriptions concur on
the TENSE-‐NUM-‐IMPF ordering. Among a slightly larger sample of some 25
contemporary kigay speakers I have documented, there is a fairly even mixture
of three variable orders.
Older data reveals some other occasional morphotactic variables in
Murrinhpatha, the description of which is beyond the scope of this article (but
see Mansfield, 2014, pp. 361–397). The overall picture presented by these
variables is of a diachronically dynamic morphological structure, in which
various sequences are becoming available or unavailable with the passing of
decades. In the following section I investigate quantitative patterns in
contemporary suffix ordering to further support this hypothesis.
5. Quantitative evidence for change-‐in-‐progress
Quantitative investigation of TENSE’s variable morphotactics provides evidence
that this morphological class is undergoing change in progress from a position
21
directly to the right of the stem, to a position at the right margin of the entire
verb complex. In the future tense, this change is almost complete among kigay
speakers, while in the past tense there is still diffuse variation, but multivariate
analysis shows that younger speaker age favours the more marginal position. On
the other hand I have not been able to identify any linguistic factor that
influences the realization of the variable. Neither is there any difference in
quantitative patterns between elicited and spontaneous speech, suggesting that
speech register or carefulness has no role in this variable.
Though it somewhat anticipates my conclusion of change in progress,
throughout this section I make shorthand reference to the previously described
sequence TENSE-‐NUM-‐IMPF as the “conservative” sequence, and the NUM-‐TENSE-‐IMPF
and NU-‐IMPF-‐TENSE sequences found in contemporary youth speech together as
the “innovative” sequences.
5.1 Data collection and analysis
The Murrinhpatha kigay speech data includes both spontaneous and elicited
speech exhibiting morphotactic variation. The spontaneous data is drawn from
five recordings of conversation and story-‐telling among kigay, in which 86 verb
tokens containing the relevant suffix combinations were identified. The
contextual and linguistic factors for these tokens are too diffuse to be
appropriate for multivariate analysis, because there are too many different
morphological sequences divided among too many different speakers, and they
appear in a variety of different syntactic positions in different sentence types.
But this data does provide an overall picture of how frequently TENSE is
reordered, which will prove to be useful at some points in this discussion. For
multivariate analysis I turn to an elicited dataset, which was designed to target
the morphotactic variation, and provides a more controlled sample of linguistic
and contextual factors. The combination of spontaneous and elicited speech data
provides for both a multivariate analysis of the variable, and a comparison
between more casual and careful speech styles.
22
I elicited target sentences to provide a controlled dataset with a sufficient
number of tokens of TENSE alongside both NUM and IMPF markers. I used a “rapid
and anonymous” elicitation method (Labov, 1972, p. 117), asking any kigay I
spoke with around Wadeye for translations of sentences such as “they were
walking”, “they were talking”, which coerce the combination of the three relevant
morphological classes. This produced 51 tokens, which I combined with another
50 tokens that occurred in verb paradigm conjugations that were also elicited
from kigay, though these were done with the more general purpose of studying
verb inflection. The collated data encompasses 25 speakers aged 18–43, mostly
producing 2–4 tokens per speaker, with a few speakers contributing up to 10
tokens. This produced a total set of 101 careful-‐speech tokens, used as a whole
for analysing the distribution of variable PST realization. For multivariate
analysis of social and linguistic factors influencing the realization, only up to five
tokens from each speaker were included, leaving a reduced set of 84 tokens.
5.2 Near-‐complete change for FUT, diffuse variation for PST
The first piece of evidence that a change in progress is underway comes from the
future TENSE marker -‐nu, which in contemporary youth speech almost
categorically uses the innovative sequences. Spontaneous speech tokens of FUT
use innovative sequences in 20 out of 21 instances, while careful speech tokens
elicited in verb paradigm conjugations show nine speakers consistently using the
innovative order, and one speaker who wavers between innovative and
conservative. The IMPF marker does not often co-‐occur with FUT, so the data is
primarily a matter of TENSE-‐NUM being replaced by NUM-‐TENSE, with the relative
ordering of TENSE and IMPF remaining obscure.8
While the reordering of FUT with respect to NUM is an almost completed
morphotactic change, PST is fairly evenly split between conservative and
innovative sequences in both spontaneous and elicited speech. I have so far not
identified any phonological, syntactic or discursive explanation for why FUT
should have advanced this change more completely than PST.9 As shown in Table
1, overall 43% of PST tokens in careful speech use innovative sequences.
23
67 with NUM
Cons. (PST – NUM) 39 (58%)
Innov. (NUM -‐ PST) 28 (42%)
24 with IMPF
Cons. (PST -‐ IMPF) 15 (62%)
Innov. (IMPF -‐ PST) 9 (38%)
10 with NUM and IMPF
Cons. (PST-‐NUM-‐IMPF) 4 (40%)
Innov. (NUM-‐IMPF-‐PST or NUM-‐PST-‐IMPF)10
6 (60%)
Total tokens = 101
Conservative 58 (57%)
Innovative 43 (43%)
Table 1. PST sequencing in careful speech
Spontaneous speech data includes 41 instances of PST combining with other
suffixes, and of these 21 instances (51%) are innovative. While the spontaneous
speech tokens cannot be usefully analyzed for linguistic or speaker factors, they
do show that the rate of innovative sequences in spontaneous speech is similar
to that in elicited speech (43%). I will argue below that this supports the
hypothesis of a morphotactic change in progress.
5.3 Speaker variation
Of the 25 speakers included in the PST sequencing elicitation, thirteen produced a
mixture of conservative and innovative sequences, while 5 speakers consistently
produced the conservative sequence and 7 consistently produced innovative
sequences. Given that morphological sequencing is usually presumed to be a
rigid part of the grammar, it was surprising to find that so many speakers
produced variable sequences within just a few speech tokens. These speakers
seamlessly switched from one sequence to another within the space of a few
seconds in response to my questions – in many cases without any hesitation that
might indicate doubts about “correctness”, or greater satisfaction with one form
or another. Neither did the “mixed bag” forms come out in any particular order:
some speakers gave the conservative form first, then switched to an innovative
form (29), some speakers did the reverse (30):
24
(29) a. pe-‐ngerren-‐dha-‐nime CLASS-‐ROOT-‐TENSE-‐NUM they were talking
b. purne-‐lili-‐dha-‐nime CLASS-‐ROOT-‐TENSE-‐NUM they were walking
c. parde-‐lili-‐nime-‐dha CLASS-‐ROOT-‐NUM-‐TENSE they were walking (FA, VPE)
(30) a. purne-‐lili-‐nime-‐dha CLASS-‐ROOT-‐NUM-‐TENSE they were walking
b. purdene-‐yitj-‐dha-‐nime CLASS-‐ROOT-‐TENSE-‐NUM they were talking
c. parde-‐lili-‐dha-‐nime CLASS-‐ROOT-‐TENSE-‐NUM they were walking (GP, VPE)
Note that PST shows very similar rates of reordering with respect to NUM and IMPF
(about 40% each), and the data also contains six innovative tokens with all three
morpheme classes present. The latter are evenly split between three tokens in
which PST moves all the way to the right edge (NUM-‐IMPF-‐TENSE) and three tokens
where it moves to the right of NUM but not TENSE (NUM-‐TENSE-‐IMPF); these
obviously do not provide sufficient data for analyzing partial and complete
rightwards movement of PST as distinct variable outcomes, so in statistical
analysis I make only a binary distinction between the conservative sequence
(TENSE-‐NUM-‐IMPF or part thereof), and any innovative sequence.
25
5.4 Younger speakers lead the innovation of PST
To test the hypothesis that morphotactic variation might reflect change in
progress, I investigated the association between innovative forms and speaker
age. Plotting the ratio of innovative versus conservative forms produced by each
speaker against the age of the speaker suggests that younger speakers indeed
make more use of the innovative sequences (Figure 4). Most speakers under 30
innovate in half their tokens or more, while most speakers over 30 innovate in a
minority of tokens or not at all; an ANOVA test in R produced a slightly sub-‐
significant measure (p=0.07) for the variance between these two groups.
Figure 4. Proportion of innovative sequences for PST suffix, plotted
against speaker age.
I used multivariate analysis to further investigate the statistical influence of
speaker age, and to test whether any other linguistic and social factors might
jointly influence the PST variable. I deployed age as a binary dependent variable,
dividing the speakers into older and younger groups according a natural break-‐
26
point that occurred in the data with one cluster of speakers aged 18–27, and
another cluster aged 32–43 (Figure 4). Age group was indeed calculated to be a
significant factor (p = 0.01), while no other factor showed significance. The other
factors I tested for were speaker’s language heritage, and the morphological
structure of the stem, as explained below. I ran the multivariate analysis in Rbrul
(Johnson, 2009), in which both step-‐up and step-‐down procedures selected the
same model, which uses only age group as a fixed factor, and speaker identity as
a random effect. Results are shown in Table 2.
Innovative sequencing of PST (deviance = 97.98, total N = 84) Age group (N speakers), (p = 0.01)
% reordered (N tokens)
Centred factor weight
Younger kigay 18–27 (15)
48% (54)
0.673
Older kigay 32–43 (10) 23% (30) 0.327
Random effect: Individual speaker Not significant: Matrilanguage (p = 0.54), Patrilanguage (p = 0.06), Lexical stem present (p = 0.10), Classifier can be simple verb (p = 0.81)
Table 2. Social factors influencing PST reordering
I considered it possible that the stem sequence might have some stochastic
influence on suffix morphotactics, and therefore tested as factor groups (a)
whether the actual verb produced included a lexical stem, or was a “simple verb”
with classifier stem only, (b) whether the classifier stem can be used as a “simple
verb”, even if it does have a lexical stem in the actual instance observed. Neither
of these factor groups showed statistical significance, though a weak trend figure
(p = 0.10) was obtained for (a), the actual presence/absence of lexical stem. This
resulted from a slight tendency in this data for verbs with lexical stems to use
innovative sequences more than simple verbs (40% innovative vs 35%
innovative).
Turning to linguistic heritage factors, I tested for language heritage because the
innovative sequence NUM-‐IMPF-‐TENSE matches the verb structures documented
for Marri languages (Ford, 2010; Green, 1989), as well as Ngan’gi (Reid, 2003, p.
27
100). We saw in section §1 that in the last half-‐century Murrinhpatha has
absorbed many new speakers from Marri languages, and to a lesser extent
Ngan’gi, and we might therefore expect Marri languages in particular to have
influenced structural changes in Murrinhpatha during this period (Thomason &
Kaufman, 1988, p. 65). However the distribution of speakers I recorded across a
matrix of language heritage factors was rather too uneven to be well suited for
factor analysis, and the results did not clearly suggest any heritage effect.
Matrilanguage was calculated to have no influence whatsoever (p = 0.54), and
while Patrilanguage was suggestively close to statistical significance (p = 0.06), it
selected Murrinhpatha paternity as favoring innovative sequences, which runs
counter to the language contact hypothesis. I would argue that the heritage data
here should not be interpreted at all based on such an equivocal result, and given
how severely it was constrained by the poor distribution of speakers across the
demographic cells (Tagliamonte, 2006). To further investigate the question of
language contact influence in this change, more extensive speaker data will need
to be collected, preferably including relevant verb tokens from older speakers
who were L1 speakers of Marri languages and learnt Murrinhpatha as L2.
5.4 The argument for change in progress
While no firm conclusions can be drawn regarding language contact, there is
substantial evidence that the variability of suffix ordering reflects a structural
change in progress in the verb. We have already seen one major strand of
evidence for this is in the fact that reordering of the FUT marker is already an
almost completed change. In verbs with the PST tense marker, the fact that
younger speakers lead reordering can also be taken as evidence of change in
progress, though it could also potentially be a style of speech that is linked to
youth identity, with speakers reverting to the conservative order as they grow
older. However I consider change in progress to be a more plausible
interpretation here. Firstly, we have seen above that the sequencing of verb
suffixes does not appear to be cognitively salient for speakers: they can switch
between orders within a matter of moments, with no sign of preference for one
form or another as being more “correct”. Secondly, in the analysis above we have
28
relied on careful, elicited speech data because only this has been able to provide
enough tokens from enough speakers in a fairly controlled linguistic context.
However I also noted that a very similar rate of innovative sequences is found in
spontaneous speech, showing that the variable is not restricted to a particular
speech style or register. On several occasions I have pointed out the variability to
speakers, but none has ever showed any awareness of the variable or a strong
preference for a “correct” variant. Instead, speakers show impatience with this
observation, and dismiss the variants as being “the same”.
In summary, there are three strands of evidence supporting an interpretation of
variable TENSE ordering as a morphosyntactic change in progress:
a) The ordering of FUT tense in contemporary kigay speech has almost
categorically changed with respect to the order attested for mission-‐era
speakers;
b) The ordering of PST tense remains variable, but innovative sequences are
statistically correlated with younger speakers, and –
c) There is no difference between the rates of innovative sequences in
spontaneous and elicited speech, and speakers show no awareness of the
variable, suggesting that it is not a stylistic effect.
We have also seen that adverbial endoclitics are obsolete in contemporary kigay
speech, and that IMPF shows signs of increased binding to the verb stem’s ω2
prosodic domain. Together these strands of evidence suffest that
Murrinhpatha’s prosodic verb is in a process of expansion.
6. Conclusion: Morphotactic restructuring and shifting word boundaries
In Murrinhpatha, Chintang and Udi, morphotactic variation is associated with
word-‐like prosodic domains inside syntactic verbal words. In all three cases
some variability is reported in the extent of this prosodic domain, so that the
whole syntactic word sometimes exhibits diagnostics of prosodic word-‐hood.
29
In Murrinhpatha, morphotactic variation appears to reflect a change in progress,
with TENSE markers shifting from a position at the right margin of the stem
sequence, to a position at the right margin of the entire verb complex. This
change may be related to the structural position of serial classifiers, which are
etymologically separate words, but show signs of a grammaticalization process
reducing their phonological form and more tightly binding them to the verbal
word. Unfortunately there is no quantified data available to show whether this
grammaticalization is also a change in progress, or whether it co-‐varies with
TENSE position. On the other hand, it is quite clear that a fusional process has
occurred in the relatively recent history of the Murrinhpatha verb, with the
contemporary bipartite stem resulting from prosodic fusion in an earlier phrasal
verb.
Acknowledgments
This article has benefited enormously from comments by Claire Bowern, Rachel
Nordlinger, Jane Simpson, and the anonymous reviewers of both thesis chapter
and article versions. Fieldwork for this study was enriched by many
Murrinhpatha speakers, but Desmond Pupuli and Luke Parmbuk took particular
responsibility for my education in their language.
References
Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. (2002). Typological parameters for the study of clitics, with special reference to Tariana. In Robert M. W. Dixon & Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald (Eds.), Word: A cross-‐linguistic typology (pp. 42–78). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bezanov, Mixail. (1888). Rust’am. Tbilisi: SMOMPK. Bickel, Balthasar, Banjade, Goma, Gaenszle, Martin, Lieven, Elena, Paudyal, Netra
Prasad, Rai, Ichichha Purna, … Stoll, Sabine. (2007). Free prefix ordering in Chintang. Language, 83(1), 43–73.
Bickel, Balthasar, & Nichols, Johanna. (2007). Inflectional morphology. In Timothy Shopen (Ed.), Language typology and syntactic description (Second edition., Vol. 3, pp. 169–240). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
30
Blevins, Juliette. (2001). Nhanda: An Aboriginal language of Western Australia. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.
Blythe, Joe. (2009). Doing referring in Murriny Patha conversation (PhD thesis). University of Sydney.
Blythe, Joe. (2010). From ethical datives to number markers in Murriny Patha. In Rachel Hendery & Jennifer Hendriks (Eds.), Grammatical Change: Theory and Description (pp. 157–184). Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.
Bonami, Olivier, & Crysmann, Berthold. (2013). Morphotactics in an information-‐based model of realisational morphology. In Stephanie Muller (Ed.), Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Head-‐Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (pp. 27–47). Freie Universita ̈t Berlin: CSLI Publications.
Bowern, Claire. (2004). Bardi verb morphology in historical perspective (PhD thesis). Harvard University.
Dixon, Robert M. W. (2002). Word: a typological framework. In Robert M. W. Dixon & Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald (Eds.), Word: A cross-‐linguistic typology (pp. 1–41). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Evans, Nicholas. (2007). Warramurrungunji undone: Australian languages in the 51st millennium. In M. Brenzinger (Ed.), Language Diversity Endangered (pp. 342–373). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Falkes, Rev., Docherty, Fr., & Gsell, Fr. (1939). Report on mission improvements and works at Port Keats. unpublished ms; accessed at Wadeye community archive.
Ford, Lysbeth. (2010). Marri Ngarr and Magati Ge learner’s guide. unpublished ms.
Green, Ian. (1989). Marrithiyel: a language of the Daly River region of Australia’s Northern Territory (PhD). Australian National Univeristy, Canberra.
Harris, Alice C. (2002). Endoclitics and the origins of Udi morphosyntax. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Haspelmath, Martin. (2011). The indeterminacy of word segmentation and the nature of morphology and syntax. Folia Linguistica, 45(1), 31–80.
Hopper, Paul, & Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. (2003). Grammaticalization (Second Edition.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Johnson, Daniel Ezra. (2009). Getting off the GoldVarb standard: Introducing Rbrul for mixed-‐effects variable rule analysis. Language and Linguistics Compass, 3(1), 359–383.
Korotkova, Natalia, & Lander, Yury. (2010). Deriving affix ordering in polysynthesis: evidence from Adyghe. Morphology, 20, 299–319.
Labov, William. (1972). Some principles of linguistic methodology. Language in Society, 1(1), 97–120.
Le Page, Robert B., & Tabouret-‐Keller, Andree. (1985). Acts of Identity: Creole-‐based approaches to language and ethnicity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mansfield, John Basil. (2014). Polysynthetic sociolinguistics: The language and culture of Murrinh Patha youth (PhD thesis). Australian National University, Canberra.
Mansfield, John Basil. (2015). The rise of phrasal verbs in Murrinhpatha. In F. Meakins & C. O’Shannessy (Eds.), Loss and renewal: Language contact in Australia since colonization. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
31
McFarland, Teresa Ann. (2009). The phonology and morphology of Filomeno Mata Totonac (PhD thesis). University of California, Berkeley.
McGregor, William. (2002). Verb classification in Australian languages. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
McKay, Graham. (1975). Rembarnga: A language of central Arnhem Land (PhD thesis). Australian National Univeristy, Canberra.
Meyerhoff, Miriam. (2013). Syntactic variation and change: The variationist framework and language contact. In I. Léglise & C. Chamoreau (Eds.), The interplay of variation and change in contact settings (pp. 23–51). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Nash, David. (1982). Warlpiri verb roots and preverbs. Work Papers of SIL-‐AAB, 6, 165–216.
Nordlinger, Rachel. (2010). Verbal morphology in Murrinh-‐Patha: Evidence for templates. Morphology, 20(2), 321–341.
Nordlinger, Rachel, & Caudal, Patrick. (2012). The tense, aspect and modality system in Murrinh-‐Patha. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 32(1), 73–112.
Pierrehumbert, Janet B. (2001). Exemplar dynamics: word frequency, lenition and contrast. In Frequency and the emergence of linguistic structure (pp. 135–157). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Poplack, Shana. (2001). Variability, frequency, and productivity in the irrealis domain of French. In Joan L. Bybee & Paul Hopper (Eds.), Frequency and the emergence of linguistic structure (pp. 405–430). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Reid, Nicholas. (2003). Phrasal verb to synthetic verb: recorded morphosyntactic changes in Ngan’gityemerri. In N. Evans (Ed.), The non-‐Pama-‐Nyungan languages of Northern Australia (pp. 95–123).
Rice, Keren. (2000). Morpheme order and semantic scope: Word formation in the Athapaskan verb. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rickford, John R., Ball, Arnetha, Blake, Renee, Jackson, Raina, & Martin, Nomi. (1991). Rappin on the copula coffin: Theoretical and methodological issues in the analysis of copula variation in African-‐American Vernacular English. Language Variation and Change, 3(1), 103–132.
Ryan, Kevin M. (2010). Variable affix order: Grammar and learning. Language, 86(4), 758–791.
Schiering, Rene, Bickel, Balthasar, & Hildebrandt, Kristine A. (2010). The prosodic word is not universal, but emergent. Journal of Linguistics, 46(3), 657–709.
Stanton, Juliet. (2013). Acoustic correlates to stress in Murrinh Patha (other than F0). Preliminary research paper, Cambridge, MA.
Stevens, A. M. (1971). Fixed morpheme order. Linguistic Inquiry, 2(3), 420–421. Street, Chester. (1987). An introduction to the language and culture of the
Murrinh-‐Patha. Darwin: Summer Institute of Linguistics. Street, Chester. (2012). Murrinhpatha to English dictionary. Unpublished MS. Tabain, Marija, Fletcher, Janet, & Butcher, Andrew. (2014). Lexical stress in
Pitjantjatjara. Journal of Phonetics, 42, 52–66. Tagliamonte, Sali A. (2006). Analysing sociolinguistic variation. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press. Thomason, Sarah, & Kaufman, Terrence. (1988). Language contact, creolization
and genetic linguistics. Berkeley: University of California Press.
32
Travis, Catherine E., & Torres Cacoullos, Rena. (2012). What do subject pronouns do in discourse? Cognitive, mechanical and constructional factors in variation. Cognitive Linguistics, 23(4), 711–748.
Walker, James A. (Ed.). (2010a). Aspect in grammatical variation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Walker, James A. (2010b). Variation in linguistic systems. London: Routledge. Walsh, Michael. (1976). The Murinypata language of north-‐west Australia (PhD
thesis). Australian National Univeristy, Canberra.
Notes
1 Abbreviations used in this chapter where possible follow Leipzig glossing
conventions, with the following customizations. ANAPH “anaphora”, APPR
“apprehensive”, CLS “clause ending”, DOBJ “direct object”, EMPH “emphatic”, IMM
“imminent”, INDOBJ “indirect object”, LV “light verb”, PAUC “paucal”, PERL
“perlative”, SER “serial classifier”, SIBL “sibling”, VEG “vegetable”. Absence of tense
abbreviation on light verbs indicates the temporally underspecified “non-‐future”
tense.
For examples of languages other than Murrinhpatha, glossing is copied directly
from the source text, and explanations of abbreviations can be sought therein. 2 Sources cited like (2001-‐01-‐01_AB) are from the author’s corpus, showing date
of recording and initials of speaker. Other source citations refer to language data
generously shared by Joe Blythe, Michael Walsh and the Wadeye Aboriginal
Language Archive (WAVA). 3 These domains have elsewhere been labelled “stem” and “clitic group”
respectively (Mansfield, 2014, p. 163, 2015), but I here use the ω2 and ω1 labels
to highlight their similarity to the domains discussed for Chintang. 4 This lengthening cannot be accounted for by stress patterns, since vowel length
is not a major stress correlate in Murrinhpatha (Stanton, 2013). 5 In my current analysis there is no secondary stress in Murrinhpatha words,
though even if there were this would not effect the current discussion, which
revolves around the determination of the word’s most prominent syllable. In a
previous analysis secondary stress was also described (Mansfield, 2014, pp.
176–190), but in view of recent findings regarding native English speakers’
33
perception of secondary stress where it is phonetically absent in Pitjantjatjara
(Tabain, Fletcher, & Butcher, 2014), secondary stress in Murrinhpatha should
not be proposed unless it can be supported by phonetic evidence, which is thus
far absent. 6 Since I am arguing that the rightwards reordering of PST reflects the expansion
of the verb’s ω2 domain, it would be interesting to know whether the production
of reordered forms correlates with phonological symptoms of the expanded ω2.
However this has not been possible with the current data, because the “rapid and
anonymous” data collection method used (§5) did not produce audio recordings
which could be checked for phonological details. 7 I do not consider it likely to be a change in progress because the same variable
absence/presence is reported (though not quantified) in the earliest detailed
documentation of Murrinhpatha (Walsh, 1976, p. 116), and because I have found
that absence is far more common in spontaneous speech than in careful speech,
which I take as evidence that it is a fairly stable variable associated with speech
register. 8 The natural kigay speech data contains just six instances of FUT combining with
IMPF, and these break down rather indecisively as four TENSE-‐IMPF and two IMPF-‐
TENSE. This suggests that the reordering of FUT may be less complete with respect
to IMPF than it is with respect to NUM, but the number of tokens is too small to
draw firm conclusions. 9 Suspecting discourse frequency as a possible influence (Pierrehumbert, 2001), I
checked some frequency counts and found 68 PST compared to 45 FUT out of
three glossed sections in the corpus (2011-‐09-‐01, 2011-‐08-‐24, Blythe 2012-‐07-‐
09). This limited sample does not support a hypothesis of greater discourse
frequency having produced more advanced language change. 10 As discussed below, three of these tokens involve PST moving all the way to the
right edge (NUM-‐IMPF-‐TENSE) and three involve partial movement (NUM-‐TENSE-‐
IMPF).
