Discourse Configurationality and the Noun Phrase in Eastern Armenian

Abstract

The subject of this paper is discourse-related word order variation associated with nominals in Eastern Armenian. Hale (1983) proposes that there are some languages which are non-configurational, i.e. lacking hierarchical syntactic structure. The properties that he proposed to be characteristic of non-configurational languages are a) free word order b) extensive use of null anaphora and c) discontinuous constituents. Armenian possesses all of these characteristics. However, since Hale’s original proposal, it has been pointed out that many apparently non-configurational languages do in fact have hierarchical syntactic structure, but that the surface patterns are determined primarily by discourse properties rather than by grammatical relations. These languages have been termed ‘discourse configurational’, defined by É. Kiss (1995) as follows: a language is discourse configurational if (discourse-) semantic functions topic (what sentence is ‘about’) and/or focus (identification) are associated with particular structural positions. It has been argued that this is indeed the case for the clause in Eastern Armenian (see e.g. Comrie (1984), Megerdoomian (2011) and Tamrazian (1994)). Making use of data from approximately 10,000 words of transcribed spontaneous speech by native speakers of Eastern Armenian discussion with native speaker consultants, and the Eastern Armenian National Corpus (www.eanc.net), I argue that the noun phrase exhibits similar discourse configurational properties to those found in the clause, and that these are responsible for word order variation within it. The interaction between noun-phrase-internal discourse-related movement and analogous discourse-related movement operations within the clause is responsible for the appearance of apparently discontinuous noun phrases. Thus the existence of Hale’s ‘non-configurational’ properties in EA does not justify the proposal that this language lacks hierarchical syntactic structure.