Uncovering ergative use in Murrinhpatha: Evidence from experimental data

IF 0.4 3区 文学 0 LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS
R. Nordlinger, E. Kidd
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引用次数: 0

Abstract

ABSTRACT Murrinhpatha, a non-Pama-Nyungan language from the Daly region of the Northern Territory of Australia, has an extant ergative case marker that has been reported to be very rare in use. In this paper we report on the use of ergative marking in an experimental study of sentence production. Forty-six adult L1 speakers of Murrinhpatha were asked to describe a series of unrelated bivalent scenes that were manipulated for humanness (±human) in the agent and patient roles. Our results show higher than expected ergative use given previous descriptions (more than 14% of utterances with an overt agent NP). Furthermore, we found an alternating pattern between multiple ergative markers that is correlated with variations in word order and humanness of agent and patient characters. This pattern seems consistent with the available naturalistic corpus, but the rate of ergative marking is so low that it may never have been identified. Our study both contributes to the typology of ergative case marking and demonstrates the value of experimental research for language description in unearthing properties of the grammatical system that may not be easily discernible in other types of corpora.
揭示Murrinhpatha中的作格使用:来自实验数据的证据
摘要Murrinhpatha,一种来自澳大利亚北领地Daly地区的非Pama Nyungan语言,有一个现存的作格格标记,据报道在使用中非常罕见。在这篇文章中,我们报告了在句子产生的实验研究中使用作格标记。46名母语为Murrinhpatha的成年人被要求描述一系列不相关的二价场景,这些场景在代理人和患者角色中被操纵以达到人性(±人类)。我们的结果显示,在之前的描述中,作格使用高于预期(超过14%的带有显性代理NP的话语)。此外,我们发现了多个作格标记之间的交替模式,该模式与语序的变化以及主体和患者角色的人性有关。这种模式似乎与现有的自然主义语料库一致,但作格标记的比率太低,可能永远无法识别。我们的研究既有助于作格格标记的类型学,也证明了语言描述实验研究在发掘语法系统的特性方面的价值,这些特性在其他类型的语料库中可能不容易辨别。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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CiteScore
1.10
自引率
0.00%
发文量
10
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