Animacy as a prominence-lending feature in Lakurumau morphosyntax and discourse
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Lidia Federica Mazzitelli
Abstract
This chapter presents a corpus-based investigation on the role of animacy as a determiner of prominence status in the morphosyntax and discourse of Lakurumau, a Western Oceanic language of Papua New Guinea. Following Himmelmann & Primus (2015), I define prominence as a relational property, which singles out one element from a set of elements of equal type and structure; prominent elements are structural attractors, that is, they may license more operations than their competitors. I show that Lakurumau human and animate referents often behave as structural attractors, being able to license more morphosyntactic operations than their inanimate counterparts: for instance, only animate referents trigger number agreement on the predicate; in discourse, human referents are much more likely to be encoded as transitive subjects (the most prominent syntactic role) than animate and inanimate ones. The Lakurumau data confirm established cross-linguistic tendencies and contribute to a better understanding of the role of animacy in the grammar and discourse of Oceanic languages.
Abstract
This chapter presents a corpus-based investigation on the role of animacy as a determiner of prominence status in the morphosyntax and discourse of Lakurumau, a Western Oceanic language of Papua New Guinea. Following Himmelmann & Primus (2015), I define prominence as a relational property, which singles out one element from a set of elements of equal type and structure; prominent elements are structural attractors, that is, they may license more operations than their competitors. I show that Lakurumau human and animate referents often behave as structural attractors, being able to license more morphosyntactic operations than their inanimate counterparts: for instance, only animate referents trigger number agreement on the predicate; in discourse, human referents are much more likely to be encoded as transitive subjects (the most prominent syntactic role) than animate and inanimate ones. The Lakurumau data confirm established cross-linguistic tendencies and contribute to a better understanding of the role of animacy in the grammar and discourse of Oceanic languages.
Chapters in this book
- Frontmatter I
- Contents V
- Prominence in Austronesian: An introduction 1
- The role of prominence in Katripul Puyuma: Voice and coding of arguments in two-place predicates 19
- Prominence and the (non-)correspondence between topic and subject in Saisiyat 55
- Information structure and syntactic choices in Kelabit 91
- The role of prominence in post-verbal word order alternation in Javanese applicatives 129
- The dynamic grammar and socio-pragmatics of prominence in Balinese 169
- Discourse, prominence, and morphosyntax: Managing information structure in Tukang Besi 201
- Accessibility and prominence in the Amarasi NP 229
- Demonstratives as markers of pragmatic prominence in Paluai (Admiralties, Oceanic) 267
- Animacy as a prominence-lending feature in Lakurumau morphosyntax and discourse 305
- Index 329
Chapters in this book
- Frontmatter I
- Contents V
- Prominence in Austronesian: An introduction 1
- The role of prominence in Katripul Puyuma: Voice and coding of arguments in two-place predicates 19
- Prominence and the (non-)correspondence between topic and subject in Saisiyat 55
- Information structure and syntactic choices in Kelabit 91
- The role of prominence in post-verbal word order alternation in Javanese applicatives 129
- The dynamic grammar and socio-pragmatics of prominence in Balinese 169
- Discourse, prominence, and morphosyntax: Managing information structure in Tukang Besi 201
- Accessibility and prominence in the Amarasi NP 229
- Demonstratives as markers of pragmatic prominence in Paluai (Admiralties, Oceanic) 267
- Animacy as a prominence-lending feature in Lakurumau morphosyntax and discourse 305
- Index 329
