Abstract
AbstractResearch on Australian languages has made a significant impact on the development of linguistic theory over the last fifty to sixty years. This chapter provides a brief overview of the key areas in which Australian languages have featured in theoretical discussions of (morpho)syntax and syntactic theory, focussing particularly on phrase structure and nonconfigurationality, ergativity, case stacking, polysynthesis, and subordination. Other areas in which Australian language data has featured in the theoretical syntactic literature include noun incorporation, polysynthesis, complex predicates, and templatic morphology; these are also briefly surveyed. The chapter focusses on the empirical issues relating to some Australian languages and points the reader to some of the relevant literature discussing the implications for different syntactic theories.
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