Radical non-configurationality without shuffle operators: An analysis of Wambaya

Abstract

The word order facts of radically non-configurational languages pose a challenge to HPSG approaches which assume both that the surface order of words is the yield of the (tectogrammatical) tree and standard HPSG-style cancellation of valence lists. These languages allow discontinuous noun phrases, in which modifiers appear separated from their head nouns by arbitrarily many other words from the same clause. In this paper, I explore an analysis which preserves tectogrammatical-phenogrammatical equivalence, and accounts for the word order facts of Wambaya with an analysis based on non-cancellation. This analysis is contrasted with other approaches to discontinuous constituents and analyses of other phenomena based on non-cancellation. Finally, I explore the implications for current models of semantic compositionality.