Warlpiri and the theory of second position clitics

Abstract

This paper examines the placement of aspect and agreement clitics in Warlpiri. A common misconception regarding clitic placement in Warlpiri is cleared up: clitic placement does not depend on syllable count. It is also shown that these clitics do not uniformly appear in second position, syntactically or phonologically, making the standard label of "second position clitics" a misnomer. An analysis is developed in terms of syntactic head movement combined with local morphological reordering. The discussion also reveals a genuine morphological first word phenomenon, whereby a preverb may be split from its associated verb.

Accented Clitics in Hittite?

“…Thus I do not think examples like (40, 43) can be accounted for along the lines of Legate () as involving two constituents in the left periphery, one of which precedes māḫḫan . They appear to involve one constituent in the left periphery, which is broken up by māḫḫan itself.…”

“…Naturally, the first account of examples like (40) that comes to mind is to suppose that the phrase which appears to be broken up by the stressed subordinator is not actually a single phrase at all. On this view, the part of the phrase that is to the left of the subordinator has moved to its current position as a result of information structure considerations, see for such an account, for example, Legate () for Warlpiri . Such examples are indeed attested in Hittite:…”

Second Position and "Floating" Clitics in Wakhi

“…Some work has also been done on Bulgarian (Pancheva 2005, Harizanov 2014) and Macedonian (Harizanov 2014). Many non-European and therefore less accessible languages (Boskovic (2001) includes Walpiri, Pashto, Mayo, and others in this list) have much less of a presence in the literature on second position clitics (see Legate (2008) for an analysis of second position clitics in Walpiri). The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the literature on second position clitics by describing and providing a preliminary analysis for second position clitics in another less accessible language: Wakhi, an endangered East-Iranian language.…”

Types of ergativity

“…Note that in (7c) the clitic cluster appears between the preverb and verb; seeNash (1982),Laughren (2002),Legate (2008b).…”