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Article published In: Asia-Pacific Language Variation
Vol. 1:2 (2015) ► pp.128–162

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Bound pronoun variation in Gurindji and Bilinarra

 | University of Queensland
Published online: 31 December 2015
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https://doi.org/10.1075/aplv.1.2.02mea
This is the first quantitative study of bound pronoun variation in an Australian language. Bound pronouns in Gurindji and Bilinarra (Ngumpin-Yapa, Pama-Nyungan) are obligatory for first and second persons, categorically absent for the third person minimal, and used 73% of the time to cross-reference third person non-minimal referents and minimal third person oblique referents. A total of 1095 tokens of referents were coded for three predictors: the grammatical relation of the referent, whether the referent was human and whether a co-referential nominal was also present in the clause. A number of properties of the referent significantly decreased the appearance of a bound pronoun including if the referent was non-human, non-human and an object, or also cross-referenced by a nominal. This variation has a number of implications for the function of bound pronouns in discourse and characterisations of non-configurational languages.
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