Abstract
This paper describes the predication of location of participants in Indigenous languages of northern Central Australia. Two main strategies are discussed: the use of double case-marking, and the co-opting of particular local cases to express scope of predication as well as location. The coopting case in question involves the Allative Nominal Construction (AN). This is the use of an allative case instead of a locative case in the meaning of ‘static location’ in a secondary predication where the subject of that predication has the same reference as an object or oblique in the main predication.
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Notes
- 1.
Location of the object can appear initially in some contexts, such as the following in which the object’s location is part of the location introduced in the previous clause. The ‘wall’ is a part of the house and acts as a link between the action of the first clause, and the action of the second clause which introduces new information, the object:
He went into the house, and on the wall saw a portrait of the Princess of Wales and the Queen. (David Lloyd-George (Member for Carnarvon Boroughs), Hansard, House of Commons. Deb 18 February 1901 vol 89 cc369–434.)
- 2.
We thank Barry Blake for drawing our attention to this.
- 3.
Abbreviations used in this paper: 1, 2, 3: first, second, third person; 111: first person exclusive plural; 333: third person plural; A: transitive subject; ABL: ablative; ACC: accusative; Afs, Afv: Yolngu verb suffixes (Schebeck 1976); ALL: allative; AN: allative-marked nominal location; AS: allative subordination; CAT: catalyst; CPL: completive; DAT: dative; ERG: ergative; EU: euphony; FALL: far allative; FOC: focus; FUT: future; GER: gerund; GO: going (verb stem formative); HN: Kenneth Hale Warlpiri field-notes 1966; ILL: illative; IO: indirect object; IRR: irrealis; LOC: Locative; LS: Locative subordination; M: masculine; MANN: manner; NALL: near allative; NFIN: nonfinite (covers forms glossed by grammarians as infinitive, nominalisation and gerund); NOM: nominative; NM: non-masculine; NPST: nonpast; O: object; part: participle; PL: plural; PCON: past continuous; PER: perlative; PRS: present; REFL: reflexive; S: subject/intransitive subject; SG: singular; TOP: topic; UNM: unmarked inflection; USIT: usitative.
- 4.
Endings which are specialized for predications of particular participants are described by Valenzuela (2005) for Shibipo, a Panoan language of South America.
- 5.
Unlike most Pama-Nyungan languages, which are absolutive-ergative, Ngarluma is a nominative-accusative language. The accusative case marker is cognate with the dative marker in many other languages.
- 6.
Gurindji data is from Patrick McConvell’s fieldwork.
- 7.
CAT is what is known as a ‘catalyst’ in Australian linguistics: an element in a small closed set which hosts pronominal enclitics of which one like Gurindji ngu has no other meaning or function; in Warlpiri similar elements do have meanings, and are generally called AUX(iliaries).
- 8.
- 9.
The collapse is rendered more complex by having different forms for each gender: /-k/ with non-masculine nouns, /-rl/ with masculine nouns and /-ij/ with plural nouns and a few other nouns mostly ending with an apical consonant Austin (1981).
- 10.
In Kaytetye, the allomorphs -le, -nge are used for INST, ERG and LOC (due to neutralisation of an original difference in vowels in Arandic).
- 11.
For example, Aet Lees (p.c. October 2011) notes a historical parallel in Finnic languages, where the Livonian Dative case corresponds to the Allative (or sometimes Adessive) case in most of the other Finnic languages.
- 12.
(Simpson 2002: 102) suggest that a number of elements diffused from Warluwarric (Breen’s Ngarna) into Ngumpin-Yapa before these two groups became separated and it is possible that similarly some features like those under discussion in this paper only entered the eastern languages of Ngumpin-Yapa. However another possibility is that AN was present in proto- Ngumpin-Yapa but was lost in the West. An alternative, but less likely hypothesis is that Ngumpin-Yapa and Warluwarric/Ngarna jointly form (part of) a higher level grouping within Pama-Nyungan. There is some lexical evidence that Yolngu could be added to such a putative linguo-genetic grouping. This could account for the sharing of the AN feature.
- 13.
(Turpin 2000: 50) also gives examples of intransitive process verbs taking allatives for the ultimate location of the subject entity.
- 14.
A similar contrast is found in Estonian (Aet Lees, p.c. October 2011).
- 15.
(Yallop 1977: 75) calls the predication of a locative to a whole clause ‘the Davidsonian event interpretation’, and claims that this is the only reading possible of Japanese locative adpositions, unlike in English for instance. In the relevant Australian cases LOC has the whole-event reading and ALL (in the locative sense) does not include the transitive subject (except in Warumungu). Whether the verb together with the object and excluding the subject agent can be interpreted as a ‘sub-event’ rather than a matter of syntactic scope is not clear.
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Acknowledgements
It is a pleasure to offer this paper in honour of Lauri Carlson, whose paper on Finnish case (Nordlinger 1998) remains a classic. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the PIONIER Workshop on Locative Case, 25–26 August 2008, Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands, the Research Centre for Linguistic Typology, La Trobe University, 9 February 2011, the Aboriginal Languages Workshop, Stradbroke Island, 11–13 March 2011, and as a seminar in the Department of Linguistics, University of Helsinki (31 October 2011). Thanks to the organisers and participants for comments, and to Barry Blake, Gavan Breen, Lauri Carlson, Diana Forker, Mary Laughren, David Nash, Rachel Nordlinger, Nicholas Ostler, Anne Tamm, and David Wilkins for sharing data and comments. We thank referees, and special thanks to Aet Lees for enlightening discussion of Estonian and Finnish.
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McConvell, P., Simpson, J. (2012). Fictive Motion Down Under: The Locative-Allative Case Alternation in Some Australian Indigenous Languages. In: Santos, D., Lindén, K., Ng’ang’a, W. (eds) Shall We Play the Festschrift Game?. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-30773-7_11
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