Uncovering ergative use in Murrinhpatha: Evidence from experimental data

Murrinhpatha, a non-Pama-Nyungan language from the Daly region of the Northern Territory of Australia, has an extant ergative case marker that has been reported to be very rare in use. In this paper we report on the use of ergative marking in an experimental study of sentence production. Forty-six adult L1 speakers of Murrinhpatha were asked to describe a series of unrelated bivalent scenes that were manipulated for humanness (& PLUSMN;human) in the agent and patient roles. Our results show higher than expected ergative use given previous descriptions (more than 14% of utterances with an overt agent NP). Furthermore, we found an alternating pattern between multiple ergative markers that is correlated with variations in word order and humanness of agent and patient characters. This pattern seems consistent with the available naturalistic corpus, but the rate of ergative marking is so low that it may never have been identified. Our study both contributes to the typology of ergative case marking and demonstrates the value of experimental research for language description in unearthing properties of the grammatical system that may not be easily discernible in other types of corpora.