The interaction of Information structure, constituent order and case marking in an Australian language: a construction-based account

This paper presents a construction-based account of the interaction of information structure with both constituent order and argument marking in Jaminjung/Ngaliwurru (J/Ng), an Australian language from the Mirndi family. Construction Grammar offers a monostratal, non-modular way of accounting for information structure, by directly mapping both prosodic and positional correlates of specific information structure categories to their discourse function (e.g. Gregory & Michaelis 2001, Lambrecht 1994, 2001). Data come from annotated corpora of naturalistic speech and elicitation based on non-verbal stimuli resulting from first-hand fieldwork. As a discourse-configurational language, in J/Ng constituent order is not determined by argument roles but by information structure in combination with considerations of rhythm and constituent weight. New/shifting topics, anti-topics and afterthoughts have (presumably universal) fixed positions in the (expanded) clause, whereas constituents within the rhematic part of an utterance have flexible ordering. Focus (both of the information focus and the corrective type) is marked prosodically rather than by position (Simard 2010, 2014, 2015), which can be accounted for by allowing for language-specific information structure constructions (cf. also Van Valin 1999). Crucially, in J/Ng, information structure not only has an influence on constituent order but also on case-marking. As in other fluid A (“optional ergative”) languages (e.g. McGregor 2006, Suter 2010, Gaby 2010, Fauconnier & Verstraete 2014, Malchukov 2015), the absence vs. presence of ergative case is associated with the status of the agentive argument as topic vs. rhematic element in a statistically significant way (Schultze-Berndt & Meakins 2017). This can be accounted for in terms of case-marking constructions with language-specific meanings, in the sense of Goldberg (1995, 2005): In J/Ng, the absolutive (unmarked) case merely signals core argument status irrespective of semantic role, while the ergative case has a constructional meaning of Effector (the entity causally involved in an event), a category which includes animate and inanimate agents as well as instruments (Van Valin & Wilkins 1996). Depending on the predictability of the agentive role of a participant (which is high for topical constituents but also for 1st and 2nd person pronouns), either the Core Argument construction is chosen, plausibly for reasons of Economy (Silverstein 1986, McGregor 1992, Aissen 1999, Malchukov 2008, 2015), or (for the sake of explicitness) the Effector construction which overtly indexes the macro-role of the argument. While this analysis is compatible with an Optimality Theory approach as long as this acknowledges the language-specific nature of argument marking, the construction-based approach offers a more explicit account than the generalised notion of “argument strength” which has been employed in some OT analyses of Differential Argument Marking (e.g. Legendre et al. 1993: 684-688, Aissen 1999, De Hoop 1999, De Hoop & Narasimhan, 2005, De Hoop and Malchukov 2007). Instead, the findings reported here support a multifactorial, “competing motivations” approach to Differential Argument Marking, and highlight the importance of information structure in this regard. The paper will conclude with a more general discussion of how universal principles and language-specific constructions interact to result in patterns of information structure, clause-level constituent order and case marking. References Aissen, Judith, (1999), Markedness and subject choice in optimality theory. 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