Abstract:

This paper presents an analysis of the order of full noun phrase arguments with respect to the verb in Garrwa non-personal narrative. Word order in this corpus is shown to be motivated by a combination of established pragmatic relations (here characterized as kontrast and rheme, following Vallduví & Vilkuna 1998), and some specific narrative functions relating to perspective structure (eg. shifts from one character's perspective to another). I also argue that the particular patterns found in the Garrwa corpus are related to its status as a verb initial language, typologically unusual in the Australian context. The results present a nice illustration of the need for close discourse based analyses of word order pragmatics, before universal primitive notions like ‘focus' and ‘topic', terms which have been commonly used in the Australianist literature, should be adopted.

Document Type: Research article

DOI: 10.1080/07268600500233027

Affiliations: 1: University of Sydney, Australia