Topics in Pintupi-Luritja syntax and semantics

Abstract

This thesis investigates a number of issues in the syntax and semantics of Pintupi-Luritja, a Western Desert (Pama-Nyungan) language spoken in Central Australia. Languages of the region have long been noted for their non-configurational character, whereby the role of syntax in determining or constraining grammatical phenomena is uncertain. However this research has largely been restricted to the determination of grammatical functions, and information structural notions. The role of scope for example as a semantic factor with a potential syntactic reflex has been comparatively much less investigated. Based on both original fieldwork and existing materials, in this thesis I investigate a range of topics in Pintupi-Luritja, and to what extent variations in meaning correlate with variations in word order. These topics include negation, focus sensitivity, and modality. These are investigated both as standalone phenomena, as well as how they interact with each other. This work suggests that to differing degrees in different domains, syntax does play an important role in determining how these phenomena interact semantically. These studies therefore not only provide a deeper description of negation, focus sensitivity, and modality in Pintupi-Luritja, but also informs both our understanding of these topics as phenomena of natural language. This in turn has theoretical significance, helping to map out the (limits of) variation in how languages do and don't encode certain phenomena through syntactic means.