Coverbs and Complex Predicates in Wagiman (review)

This description of the morphology and semantics of complex predicates in Wagiman is a revised version of the author’s Honors thesis, completed in 1997 at Sydney University, Australia. Wagiman is a non-Pama-Nyungan language spoken by approximately ten people around the area of Pine Creek, south of Darwin in Australia’s Northern Territory. Wilson collected data for the book over several field trips, and he is involved in language preservation projects as well as theoretical work on the language.

Many languages of the northern part of Australia have a complicated verbal structure known as ‘coverbs’. In such languages the verbal complex is split into two parts—a fully inflecting part (carrying agreement morphology) and a ‘coverb’, whose inflectional possibilities are normally limited to certain aspectual, temporal, and locational markers. Prosodically, both parts are independent words. Not all clauses contain both inflecting verbs and coverbs; some clause structures contain only coverbs (without inflecting verbs). The inflecting verbs form a closed set, and they may appear without an accompanying coverb. W explains his terminology clearly. This is particularly important when dealing with this topic, as depending on the languages involved the terms can refer to precisely the opposite part of the verb complex (compare, for example, the use of the term ‘coverb’ to refer to the inflecting part of the verb complex in Bardi and Ungarinyin, in opposition to the ‘preverb’).

The book contains both a semantic analysis of the relationship between the coverb and the inflecting verb and a grammatical analysis of the structures. In the author’s own words, he examines ‘how the meaning of the whole is derived from the meaning of the parts’. W sets out in Ch. 5 the semantics of the combination of the 500 or so coverbs with the 45 inflecting verbs.

W analyzes the coverb structures as complex predicates; that is, structures where both parts contribute to the meaning and argument structure of what is essentially a single predicate (similar in many ways to serial verb constructions). W gives a number of different types of evidence for analyzing the constructions this way, such as monoclausality. This can be tested as it is possible for inflecting verbs to appear in a different clause from the coverb, which results in different intonation patterns.

The theoretical framework for the formal analysis of the predicate constructions is lexical functional grammar (LFG). The separation of levels of structure within LFG (f-structure, c-structure, for example) is highly suited to analyzing Australian languages such as Wagiman since approaches which rely heavily on configurationality pose problems for obviously nonconfigurational languages like Wagiman. In order to account for the semantics of the complex predicate, W replaces the single pred feature with a lcs, or ‘lexical conceptual structure’. The lcs of the coverb fuses (through ordinary unification) with the lcs of the inflecting verb.

W’s style is clear, and there are many examples. I am surprised and glad that he was able to cover so much in a relatively short book.