Grammatical Relations and Information Structure in Eibela: A typological perspective

Abstract

Eibela, also referred to as Aimele (Ethnologue code: AIL), has approximately 300 speakers living primarily in Lake Campbell, Western Province, Papua New Guinea. The genetic affiliation of Eibela has not been thoroughly investigated, but it is likely that it belongs to the putative Trans-New Guinea Phylum, of the central and South New Guinea stock. The expression of grammatical relations in Eibela emerges largely as a combination of case-marking, which is largely optional, and constraints based on information structure. Additionally, oblique case markers may function to append clausal constituents to a clause as well as nominal arguments. Many properties which typically define grammatical relations are peripheral or absent in Eibela. Arguments are often elided if the referent can be recovered from context, and agreement morphology is only rarely present in verbs. An ergative-absolutive case-marking system is present, but core case affixes are not obligatory. Constituent order is similar to case marking in being a non-obligatory indicator of grammatical relations. The use of case-markers is governed in large part by constituent order, which is in turn largely determined by information structure considerations such as definiteness and topicality. Grammatical roles must therefore be defined by a cluster of structural tendencies, none of which are obligatory. Show more