Word order flexibility in Pitjantjatjara

Abstract

Word order flexibility as a feature of (some) Australian languages has been much discussed in the theoretical literature since Hale’s early work on Warlpiri (e.g. Hale 1981, 1983; see also Simpson 1991; Austin and Bresnan 1996; Nordlinger and Bresnan 2011), and it has long been recognised that word order does not play a major role in these languages in identifying grammatical functions (Hale 1983; Nordlinger 1998; Simpson 1983). Simpson (1983, 18) describes Warlpiri as a language in which ‘the burden of representing the relations between predicates and arguments … is borne by the morphology rather than the syntax’, highlighting the importance of case marking and argument agreement f..