Constraints on noun phrase discontinuity in an Australian language: The role of prosody and information structure

Abstract

Discontinuous noun phrases have posed a long-standing challenge for syntactic analysis. While there exists increasing evidence that discontinuous NPs are associated with specific information structure constellations c rosslinguistically, Australian languages continue to be presented in the literature as radically non-configurational, with unlimited freedom of word order. We argue for Jaminjung, an Australian language of the Mirndi family, that once true NP discontinuity is carefully distinguished from other, superficially similar constructions, it is in fact highly constrained and can be described in terms of very specific information structure categories. The first of these, contrastive argument focus on an NP containing a given element, is widely attested crosslinguistically. The second, sentence focus, has only rarely been associated with noun phrase discontinuity in the literature. We show that the two types can be distinguished on prosodic grounds. Our account of both types challenges some previous analyses which rely on different information structure values for the parts of the discontinuous NP. The findings underscore the importance of taking into account prosodic information and discourse context in the syntactic analysis of spoken language.

Exclusives, equatives and prosodic phrases in Samoan

“…More generally, these results suggest it is important to consider information structure in tandem with syntactic influences on phrasing, so information structural effects are not mistaken for syntactic ones (cf. Schultze-Berndt & Simard 2012).…”

Noun phrase constituency in Australian languages: A typological study

“…(Bowern 2012a: 329) b. gooyarra aarli i-na-m-boo-na two fish 3-TR-PST-spear-REMPST c. aarli i-na-m-boo-na gooyarra fish 3-TR-PST-spear-REMPST two Additionally, examples from grammatical descriptions that do not discuss discontinuity in detail often seem to fit the analyses of contrastive argument focus and of sentence focus made by Schultze-Berndt & Simard (2012) and McGregor (1997), though of course these intuitions would need to be confirmed by detailed discourse studies for individual languages.…”

“…Before we move on to the analysis, a methodological note is in order about the identification of discontinuous constructions. As argued convincingly by Schultze-Berndt & Simard (2012), it is important to distinguish "genuine" discontinuous structures from structures that are really two (or more) separate, though co-referential, NPs. Co-referential NPs can be used, for instance, in dislocation and afterthought constructions, as in the Bilinarra example in (26), where a coreferential NP is added after the clause to further clarify the referent, viz., whose house the speaker is talking about (Meakins & Nordlinger 2014: 352).…”

“…In Jaminjung, for example, discontinuous NPs are only approximately 1 % of all NPs in discourse (Schultze-Berndt & Simard 2012: 1032, in Mawng they represent 1.41 % of all NPs (Forrester 2015: 58), and in Gooniyandi, discontinuous NPs "amount to less than 5 % of all NPs" (McGregor 2004: 276). Other descriptions do not mention percentages, but often simply state that discontinuous structures are "much less common" than contiguous structures (Gaagudju;Harvey 2002: 316), or that co-referential elements occur contiguously "[i]n perhaps the majority of the examples", though "they may occur separately" (Warrongo ;Tsunoda 2011: 348).…”

“…This can be contrastive argument focus, as in (32a), where the discontinuous element gujugujugu 'big' is highlighted in contrast with the much smaller size of the tents that were used earlier. Or it can mark sentence focus, which typically involves out-of-the-blue statements that "alert the hearer to the presence or appearance of an entity with a particular property, or in a particular quantity" (Schultze-Berndt & Simard 2012: 1041, as in (32b). We do not have such detailed analyses for many languages in our sample, but if authors mention anything about discontinuity, they often suggest informationstructural functions.…”