Combinatory Possibilities in Murrinh-Patha Complex Predicates: A Type-Driven Approach

This paper is concerned with complex predicates in Murrinh-Patha, a Northern Australian language. In Murrinh-Patha, a verb usually has a bipartite structure, i.e., the lexical meaning of a word is determined together by two different parts. This paper looks at the combinatory possibilities of these two parts, establishes some factors which may play a role in the selection process and proposes a formal modeling of the data using a fine-grained semantic type hierarchy. The paper then compares this approach to accounts utilizing the idea of lexical conceptual structures (LCSs) (Jackendoff, 1990) such as e.g., Butt (1995) and Wilson (1999).