Author: Nordlinger, Rachel and Joan Bresnan

Date: August 27, 1996

Title: Nonconfigurational Tense in Wambaya

Remarks: Paper presented at LFG-96, Grenoble.  15 pp.

Abstract: Wambaya is a nonconfigurational language of Northern
Australia. Like its better known neighbour Warlpiri, Wambaya exhibits
all of the characterstics typically associated with
nonconfigurationality (Hale 1983, Speas 1990): lack of evidence for a
VP constituent, extensive null anaphora, pragmatically-determined word
order, and discontinuous constituents (see Nordlinger 1995).  In
addition, however, Wambaya also has nonconfigurational tense marking,
in which (possibly non-indentical) tense markers appear in two places
in the clause and combine to determine the tense value for the clause
as a whole.  In this paper we provide an analysis for this complex and
unusual tense marking system, in which tense values are treated as
composites of three more primitive features. Furthermore we show that,
while the Wambaya tense marking facts pose serious challenges to a
movement-based framework, they validate a prediction inherent in the
architecture of a unification-based framework that makes use of the
principle of lexical integrity and thus, can be given an intuitive and
revealing account within LFG.