What drives word order flexibility? Evidence from sentence production experiments in two Australian Indigenous languages

Rachel Nordlinger, Gabriela Garrido Rodriguez, Sasha Wilmoth & Evan Kidd

UniMelb and MPI Nijmegen

This will be a dry run for SLE conference (20 min).

In this talk we will discuss flexible word order in Murrinhpatha and Pitjantjatjara, two indigenous languages of Australia, reporting experimental work examining sentence production and word order using eye-tracking. In our studies, we asked participants (Murrinhpatha, N= 43; Pitjantjatjara, N= 50) to describe pictures of transitive events while their eye movements to the characters were recorded. Our results suggest no default, underlying word order in these languages. We will discuss a number of factors that might influence word order choice: i) conceptual accessibility of characters; ii) bottom-up perceptual cues, and iii) individual speaker preferences. This work contributes to the limited literature on sentence production and word order flexibility and provides a useful methodology for investigating the ordering patterns employed by speakers of languages where ordering is not syntactically determined.

Friday 21 August, 4:00pm

https://unimelb.zoom.us/j/99244268355?pwd=T2U3a0FWTmFZVXdMcTBFeFNONGJ6UT09
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