Review of Mushin & Baker (2008): Discourse and Grammar in Australian Languages

Abstract

Discourse and Grammar in AustralianLanguages is a collected volume of seven studies which explore the interplay between grammatical structure and discourse structure in Indigenous Australian languages. The intersection between grammar and discourse is an under-studied area in the Australian context, so this book is a much needed and excellent contribution both for the Australianist research community and for typological and comparative work in this domain.Descriptive work on Australian languages has generated interesting problems for morpho-syntactic theory, most prominently the issue of non-configurationality. A key part of the account of non-configurationality for Australian languages is the claim that constituent order is not determined by grammatical relations, but rather by pragmatic-discourse conditions. While this claim has been widespread, little has been done to rigorously and empirically account for these conditions. In addition to matters of configurationality, other features of Australian languages call for the particular investigation of information packaging and reference as tackled by this volume. Such characteristics include: noun class markers and classifier constructions, complex and/or unusual NP structures (e.g. discontinuous NPs, kin dyad constructions, inclusory constructions), high levels of ellipsis, intricate kinship systems, and highly developed case marking systems.In recent years this gap in the understanding of discourse-related phenomena has increasingly been noted (see the survey in Gaby 2008) and work has begun to remedy it -this volume and the Australianist workshop (held in 2004) at which many of these papers were initially presented represent part of this effort.