Agreement in Murrinh-Patha Serial Verbs

racheln unimelb.edu.au Abstract. Murrinh-Patha (non-Pama-Nyungan, Australia) has a serial verb construction that is used to encode imperfective aspect. In this construction, one of a set of seven intransitive verbs is serialised to the end of the polysynthetic main verb. Previous descriptions of Murrinh-Patha (e.g. Walsh 1976, Street 1987) state that the serial verb in the imperfective aspect construction must agree with the main verb in terms of subject person and number, and tense/aspect/mood. While this is generally true, in fact the situation is not as straightforward as this would suggest and apparent agreement mismatches arise in a number of ways. In this paper I present the full range of these agreement puzzles in Murrinh-Patha serial verb constructions and discuss the challenges they pose for linguistic analysis. I argue that when viewed within the context of the Murrinh-Patha agreement system more generally their analysis becomes more straightforward and show how they can be accounted for using the formal theoretical framework of Lexical-Functional Grammar