Topic and focus in Ngardi

Honeyman, Tom

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Open Access

Field	Value	Language
dc.contributor.author	Honeyman, Tom
dc.date.accessioned	2005-10-21
dc.date.available	2005-10-21
dc.date.issued	2005-10-21
dc.identifier.uri	http://hdl.handle.net/2123/139
dc.description	This is an Honours thesis based on field data and grammatical analysis collected by Lee Cataldi with help from Tjama Napanangka. The supervisors were William Foley and Jane Simpson.	en
dc.description.abstract	This paper examines the discourse pragmatics of the non- configurational (free word order) Australian language Ngardi. Ngardi is a Ngumbin language spoken by a small number of people east of the Kimberleys. I examine Topic and Focus in equational sentences and question forms gathered from transcripts of card games played by Ngardi speakers. I examine this data from the Information Structure perspective as defined by Lambrecht (1994) and include some discussion of Choi's (2001) NEW and PROM binary features. I conclude that a range of constituents to the left of the obligatory pronominal clitics are conditioned by discourse pragmatic factors.	en
dc.description.sponsorship	The field data for this thesis was collected by Lee Cataldi, funded by ARC Grant No. A10009036, Chief Investigators Christopher Manning and Jane Simpson.	en
dc.format.extent	409727 bytes
dc.format.extent	812354 bytes
dc.format.mimetype	application/pdf
dc.format.mimetype	text/richtext
dc.language.iso		en
dc.rights	Other	en
dc.subject	Australian languages	en
dc.subject	Ngardi	en
dc.subject	syntax	en
dc.subject	information structure	en
dc.subject	discourse structure	en
dc.subject	pragmatics	en
dc.title	Topic and focus in Ngardi	en
dc.type	Thesis	en
dc.type.thesis	Honours	en
dc.rights.other	The author retains copyright of this thesis. It may only be used for the purposes of research and study. It must not be used for any other purposes and may not be transmitted or shared with others without prior permission.	en
usyd.faculty	Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, School of Humanities