NON-CONFIGURATIONALITY IN AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINAL LANGUAGES

The syntax of the Australian Aboriginal language Warlpiri has led to t wo opposing models of non-configurationality: a dual structure hypothe sis, which abandons the projection principle for a grammatical archite cture that separates constituency and functional representations (Simp son 1983, 1991, Hale 1983, Kroeger 1993), and a pronominal argument hy pothesis, which hypothesizes that bound or zero pronominals satisfy th e projection principle in such languages, with free nominals analysed as adjuncts (Jelinek 1984, Baker 1991, Hale 1993). Although the pronom inal argument hypothesis is widely accepted in the syntactic literatur e, we show that available evidence from Warlpiri, new evidence from th e related language Jiwarli, and a survey of six other Australian langu ages actually support the dual structure hypothesis. The non-configura tionality characteristics of free word order, null anaphora, and split NPs are in fact independent of each other and of the distribution of bound pronouns. Additionally, the clitic pronouns that Jelinek (1984) and others take to be the source of non-configurationality in Warlpiri are simply an areal feature of Australian languages that is independe nt of the syntactic properties that are supposed to derive from it.