Motivations for second position: Evidence from North-Central Australia

Abstract

It has long been observed that many languages from all over the world require that certain grammatical categories (e.g., person, number, tense, modality) occur in the “second position” of a clause. Much of the research into second position has developed formal explanations for this recurring pattern, based on interactions between morphosyntax and phonology. In this article I explore how pragmatics of information packaging interacts with these other features in the development of such morphosyntactic architecture in three North-Central Australian languages: Warlpiri, Wambaya, and Garrwa.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 130 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.