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Dissertation Information
| Title: | Agreement in Mawng: Productive and lexicalised uses of agreement in an Australian language | Add Dissertation |
| Author: | Ruth Singer | Update Dissertation |
| Email: | click here to access email | |
| Homepage: | http://lands.let.ru.nl/~singer/ | |
| Institution: | University of Melbourne, Department of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics | |
| Completed in: | 2006 | |
| Linguistic Subfield(s): | Language Documentation; Semantics; Syntax; Typology; | |
| Subject Language(s): |
Maung
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| Director(s): |
Rachel Nordlinger Nicholas Evans |
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| Abstract: | This thesis is a morphosyntactic description of the Australian language Mawng with a focus on verbal gender agreement and its lexicalisation. Mawng's five genders have a strong semantic basis. In verbs with lexicalised agreement, a verbal pronominal prefix that usually indexes a core argument of a particular gender instead functions to specify a particular sense of the verb. Such verbs form a significant portion of the verbal lexicon in Mawng. An investigation of these verbs requires an updated description of Mawng, which has not been the object of linguistic study for some time. A non-Pama Nyungan language of the Iwaidjan language family, Mawng is still spoken by around three hundred people living on the north-west coast of Arnhem land, Northern Territory, Australia. This description is based on new fieldwork carried out at Warruwi (Goulburn Island) and adds to what was previously known about the Mawng language. Complex verb constructions, reciprocal constructions, argument structure, complex sentences, NP structure, the semantic basis of the gender system and the nature of verbal agreement are some of the topics explored in greater detail in this thesis than previously available materials. Lexicalised agreement was not discussed in previous work on Mawng. Lexicalised agreement is defined as the lexicalisation of otherwise productive verbal agreement morphology. Verbs with lexicalised agreement are described through descriptions of various classes of verbs with common semantic and syntactic properties. I argue that verbs with lexicalised agreement are best understood as a type of verb- argument idiom like noun-verb idioms. In both lexicalised agreement verbs and noun- verb idioms, a verb and an element that usually expresses an argument of the verb develop a conventionalised meaning that is noncompositional. There are many semantic and syntactic parallels between lexicalised agreement verbs, noun-verb idioms and also lexicalised noun-incorporations. All three expressions are a type of verb-argument idiom in which an element that usually encodes an argument of the verb has become lexicalised as part of a new expression together with the verb I develop a preliminary typology of lexicalised agreement which is rare but by no means unique to Mawng. It is also found in the non-Pama Nyungan languages Gaagudju and Tiwi, the North American language Southern Tiwa (Kiowa-Tanoan) and the Siberian isolate Ket. |
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