Second Position Clitic Phenomena in North-Central Australia….pdfVIP

Proceedings of the 2004 Conf erence of the Australian Linguistic Society 1 Second Position Clitic Phenomena in North-Central Australia: Some * Pragmatic Considerations ILANA MUSHIN University of Sydney ilana.mushin@.au 1. Introduction This paper presents a discourse-pragmatic based examination of a well-recognised grammatical phenomenon common to many Australian languages: enclitic ‘complexes’ that code grammatical categories like person/number/gender of arguments (ie. bound pronouns) and sometimes also modal and tense information. All Australian languages which have such enclitics show at least some contexts in which the clitic complex is fixed in second position, following a range of constituent types that can occur clause initially. In some languages, there is a preference for verb attachment, regardless of position. This paper is concerned with the ‘positional’ enclitics – those which primarily occur in second position, even though they may occur elsewhere in certain contexts. Explanations for the grammatical status of these positional enclitics have focussed on their syntactic properties, considering how they should be represented in the syntax of the languages that have them (eg. McConvell 1996, Laughren 2002); relationships to ‘non- configurationality’ (eg. Austin Bresnan 1996, Nordlinger 1998a, Pensalfini 2004); relationships between free and bound pronominals (eg. Dixon 2002). Most of this work however acknowledges that clitic attachment (to an initial constituent) is related to a pragmatic notion, usually called ‘Focus ’. In some syntactic approaches ‘Focus ’ is analysed as a syntactic p