Pragmatic functions of Thaayorre ergative morphology

Alice Gaby
UC Berkeley

In Kuuk Thaayorre, ergative marking is of both syntactic and pragmatic import. Syntactically, ergative inflection marks a noun phrase as the subject of a transitive clause. Whilst this may be considered definitional of an ergative morpheme, Kuuk Thaayorre joins a growing number of languages in which ergative marking is documented to be 'optional'; not obligatorily present in all transitive clauses. Hence in examples such as (1), the transitive subject is unmarked:

(1)	minh patp piinth.kat waawath-ø MEAT hawk(?ERG) scrap(ACC) search:RDP-NPST
	'hawks fossick for scraps'

Conversely – and more unusually – the subject of an intransitive clause may in some cases be ergative-marked:

(2)	parr-an pul kuta-ku ngok-eln wont-r child-?ERG 3du(NOM) dog-?ERG water-LOC fall-NPST
	'the child and the dog fall into the water [together]'

This paper proposes to account for this distribution of the ergative morpheme both synchronically (in terms of dual syntactic and pragmatic functions) and diachronically (in terms of the origin of the ergative morphology in 'focus' marking). It suggests that we may infer a stage of Kuuk Thaayorre's history at which the alternation between syntactically equivalent full and phonologically-reduced nominal allomorphs was reflective of focus and information status. This alternation later became reanalysed as contrastive, and the pragmatic basis of this contrast was subsequently reanalysed as syntactic. The reanalysis of the 'unreduced' nominal forms as ergative-marked has produced a typologically unusual pattern of case-marking in Kuuk Thaayorre, in which the ergative case is marked by highly irregular phrasal suffixes.

Interestingly, this chain of development from a pragmatically-determined formal alternation to a syntactic contrast between ergative and nominative cases, appears to have been later replicated in the same language. The Thaayorre 'focal' morpheme, -thurr, is synchronically polyfunctional, serving to mark both pragmatic focus (on a variety of word classes), but also ergative case. Though most probably a dedicated discourse marker in origin, -thurr is today by far the most productive ergative allomorph, and seems likely to replace the other (irregular) suffix forms in the speech of younger Thaayorre.