Non-referential actor indexing in Nehan

Title: Non-referential actor indexing in Nehan
Creator: Olstad, John
Relation: 42nd Australian Linguistic Society Conference (ALS). Proceedings of the 42nd Australian Linguistic Society Conference (Canberra 1-4 December, 2011) p. 296-314
Relation: http://www.als.asn.au/proceedings.html
Publisher: Australian Linguistic Society
Resource Type: conference paper
Date: 2012
Description: Non-referential actor indexing is found in many languages in the form of 3PL impersonal constructions. In the sentence, “They don’t drink root beer in Australia.”, the actor they does not refer to any specific entity. In addition to 3PL impersonals, the Nehan language of northern Bougainville uses non-referential actor indexing for middle voice-like constructions, undergoer promotion, and—perhaps uniquely—expands impersonal constructions using 3SG agreement to indicate that the actor of the verb either lacks sentience or has accidentally carried out an action. This paper describes the semantics of non-referential actor indexing constructions and their role in argument structure.
Subject: impersonals; non-referential indexing; argument structure; Oceanic; semantics
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1309321
Identifier: uon:21839
Identifier: ISBN:9780980281546
Language: eng
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