Not obligatory

Abstract

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.