Pragmatically case-marked: Non-syntactic functions of the Kuuk Thaayorre ergative suffix

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1 This paper was produced with the collaboration of Gilbert Jack, who worked with me tirelessly in transcribing and translating many hours of videos of conversation and stories told by Alfred Charlie, Molly Edwards, Esther Foote, Myrtle Foote, Albert Jack, Gilbert Jack and Donald William. All of my research on Kuuk Thaayorre has been generously supported by the Pormpuraaw Community Council and other members of the Pormpuraaw Community. The research reported here was funded by the University of Melbourne and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. Bill McGregor made numerous pertinent and very helpful comments on earlier drafts, but also led by example with his excellent treatments of optional Ergativity in Warrwa and Gooniyandi. Jean-Christophe Verstraete, Brett Baker, Nick Evans and Rachel Nordlinger also gave extremely useful feedback and helped to refine the argument presented here. Remaining errors are of course my own.

2 Note that apposed NPs are frequently discontiguous.

3 In this case, there is also an additional apposed noun phrase (kuthirr 'two') which refers to the superset (i.e. the speaker and I. C.) denoted by the pronoun. See Gaby (2005, 2006) for a definition of the noun phrase in Kuuk Thaayorre.

4 Note that there is no parallel ‘optional accusativity’ in the Thaayorre pronominal paradigm, such as that found in Dyirbal (Dixon 1972). This may be attributable to the fact that though Thaayorre pronouns inflect for case, they are not marked by easily segmentable case affixes (my thanks to Bill MacGregor, p.c., who pointed this out).

5 See Gaby (2006) for a fuller description of case allomorphy in Kuuk Thaayorre and Gaby (under review) for a discussion of the likely historical processes that gave rise to the present situation.

6 That is to say, although the noun on which ergative case is realised is determined by its position in the noun phrase, this ergative marking must be analysed as an inflectional affix rather than a postpositional enclitic. See Anderson, Brown, Gaby and Lecarme (2006) for a fuller justification of viewing the Thaayorre ergative morpheme as a phrasal suffix.

7 The dative form of the pronoun is used in many comitative contexts.

8 Kuuk Thaayorre distinguishes the adnominal and relational functions of both the proprietive and privative case enclitics; the relational function is signaled by the inclusion of /k/ clitic-initially, while the adnominal function is signaled by its omission (cf. Gaby 2006: 196-199 for fuller discussion).

9 This is further demonstrated by referring to Table 1 above.

10 For the remainder of this paper, the term 'topic' will be avoided due to its inconsistent usage in the literature. Instead, I refer to the 'protagonist' of a story, by which I mean the participant who the story is about, who is the primary actor across multiple clauses (and thus tending to be in transitive or intransitive subject function throughout the text).

11 Note, though, that McGregor's (1998) Expected Actor Principle (applicable only to narratives) only deals with one component of what I argue makes a subject-participant alignment 'expected' in Kuuk Thaayorre, namely the discourse context.

12 The ‘Frog Story’ is a widely used elicitation tool, in which a picture story book (with no words) is shown to a consultant who then tells the story depicted. The narrative analysed in this paper was supplied by a consultant in her sixties, with the purpose of creating a Thaayorre text that could be placed in the school library. The narrative was transcribed by me, and this transcription checked both with the original consultant and another, younger Thaayorre speaker. This level of scrutiny might be expected to produce ‘hyper-correct’ speech, however, there remained several instances of ergative marking on intransitive subjects and unmarked transitive subjects. In this case, the higher level of editorial care by native speakers was particularly useful in ruling out speech error. The structure of the narrative (i.e. as a series of multi-clausal descriptions of pictures to be written down and placed in a library, rather than a flowing interpersonal dialogue), also prompted the speaker to include many full noun phrases in place of the ubiquitous argument ellipsis that characterises Thaayorre speech. So, while not necessarily representative of natural speech, it is an extremely valuable resource for investigating the case marking of introduced, repeated, expected and unexpected arguments.

13 The verb rirkr (which, in its basic sense, means 'arise'), commonly combines with Thaayorre nouns or loan verbs to produce a complex predicate. The transitivity of this predicate is determined by the first element, thus: fly-m rirk 'fly (intrans)', love-m rirk 'love (trans)', pancr rirk 'be shame (intrans)' (nb. pancr is a noun meaning 'body hair') and mit rirk 'work (intrans)' (mit being a noun meaning 'work' or 'job'). In this construction, mit 'work' does in some respects resemble a direct object, for example in that it can be modified:
(i) mit pork rirk ngancin

work big DO:npst 1pl:excl(nom)

'we work hard'
However, in an elicitation context the subject of mit rirk is always nominative in form, suggesting the predicate as a whole is intransitive:
(ii) Sitika mit rirk-m

Sitika work DO-P.IPFV

'Sitika was working'

14 In pragmatically unmarked clauses, however, coreferential pronouns and NPs would typically be adjacent.

15 The verb path 'bite' is used to describe a snake killing a person or animal.

16 See also Heath (1976).

17 There is thus greater potential for ambiguity where the Undergoer is higher in animacy, despite world knowledge suggesting that a dog is unlikely to pick up a boy.

18 Cf. also Heath (1976:177).

19 This is somewhat similar to the Warrwa 'focal ergative marker' (McGregor 2006), in that a single core syntactic case may be expressed by two alternative (pragmatically-conditioned) forms.

20 Note, though, that this does not apply to the emphatic function of one ergative morph (-thurr), as described in §6.

21 This analogy was drawn by Bill McGregor (p.c.).

22 The reader is reminded that ‘pragmatic markedness’ here refers to the obviousness of the subject – participant mapping, rather than to the ease with which the subject’s identity can be retrieved from context. So ‘expected subject’ is shorthand for ‘NP referent is expected to have the grammatical function of subject’, not that the referent of the NP is expected in itself. If we are to add into equation whether or not the addressee is expected to know the subject’s identity, table 4 should be modified to include the ellipsis of arguments, as follows:
Referentiality in questionReferentially givenExpected subjectPragmatically neutralUnexpected subjectErgativepampam-alpam-al—Nominativepampampam-al—Accusativepampampam—

Table 4b. The interaction between syntactic case and pragmatics in determining argument form.