Ebook: Categories, Constituents, and Constituent Order in Pitjantjatjara: An Aboriginal Language of Australia

A description of the syntax of the Australian Aboriginal language Pitjantjatjara. This book looks at the relevant categories and constituents in the language and examines the question of whether the constituents exhibit a syntactically basic order. The data shows that word order in a range of constructions is constrained and Heather Bowe argues that these facts would be consistent with an analysis of word order being syntactically significant in Pitjantjatjara. The constraints on word order are of particular interest in that they contrast significantly with word order features reported for the neighbouring language Warlpiri, widely considered to be a canonical "free word order" language. The topics of syntactic constituency and word order are relevant to current research on linguistic theory and the possible existence of "non-configurational" languages as addressed by Chomsky, as well as to the typological study of languages as addressed by Joseph Greenberg. The detailed descriptions of complex sentence constructions, including switch-references, will interest linguistics working within the generative tradition as well those working within a typological framework. Heather Bowe has lived in the Pitjantjatjara area in central Australia and her study is based on the extensive field data, including narrative texts, collected during this period.