Patrick Caudal

Now or Then? The Clitic -rru in Panyjima: Temporal Properties in Discourse

The clitic -rru in Panyjima, glossed as ‘now’ by Dench, appears not only in present tense but also in past and future clauses. This paper analyses the uses of this clitic and its interactions with tenses at clause level, as well as its role in the wider discourse context. We argue that -rru has temporal and contrastive properties, more specifically that -rru modifies the time of the eventuality denoted and signals a change: it introduces a contrast with an earlier state of affairs corresponding to the negation of the eventuality denoted. Thus temporal progression is also inferred. We propose to represent this contrast as a presupposition that -rru introduces, using Discourse Representation Theory (DRT). We also show that in discourse, -rru is used to introduce new subtopics, thus expressing contrasts at this wider level as well. Discourse relations and their temporal inferences are analysed using Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT). We conclude that, while -rru often corresponds to the adverb ‘then’ in English, its contrastive properties liken it more to the adverb ‘now’ in other languages, especially when the latter is used in non-present time contexts.

The Tense, Aspect and Modality System in Murrinh-Patha

This paper is an overview of the tense, aspect and modality (TAM) system in Murrinh-Patha, a polysynthetic language of the Daly River region of northern Australia. Our aim is to provide a detailed account of the range of TAM categories and their uses, highlighting along the way areas of interest for theoretical semantic analysis. We build here on earlier descriptions of tense, aspect and mood in Murrinh-Patha, most notably work by Street, and argue for reanalysis and refinement in various places, resulting in what we believe to be a more accurate and revealing analysis of the overall system.

A semantic type-driven account of verb-formation patterns in Panyjima

In this paper we propose a semantic type-driven account of verb-formation patterns in Panyjima. By offering an explicit theory for the construal of semantically simplex event descriptions from morphologically complex verbal stems, we flesh out intuitions dating back to Clark and Clark (1979) about the role of derivational morphology in the interpretation of derived verbs, especially denominal verbs. This latter point is of particular relevance to a general theory of verb meaning (inclusive of, but not limited to, Aktionsart/lexical aspect), as most formal theories of lexical semantics have been primarily developed for languages with a rich verbal lexicon. By contrast, Australian languages often have a much smaller verbal lexicon and rely more heavily on productive processes of verbalization. The challenge we intend to meet is to provide a formal analysis that matches the productive morphology of the language under investigation. We offer an implementation couched within the Type Composition Logic (TCL) of Asher (2011), which demonstrates how TCL can successfully capture the contextual interpretation of productively derived Panyjima verbs.