This chapter investigates the range of constructions in Ngan'gityemerri that can be thought of as involving shifts in the associated argument structure of verbs. The major contribution of this chapter is to highlight the fact that some languages have at their disposal morphosyntactic mechanisms that encode valency, without necessarily needing morphological derivations to achieve the same kinds of valency shifts that derivations are good for. Ngan'gityemerri's main strategy, a system of complex verb formation, is of the morphosyntactic type. However, it does additionally make use of some minor but genuinely morphological derivations, including a presentative applicative derived from an incorporated bodypart noun.

Preliminaries

There are two parameters around which Australian languages vary. Firstly, most employ suffixes, but in northern Australia there is a large bloc of languages that also use prefixes. These latter ‘prefixing’ languages mostly have A, S and O bound pronominals as prefixes to the verb. Ngan'gityemerri requires the obligatory cross-referencing of core arguments by bound pronominals on the verb in strictly nominative/accusative patterning. However it is unusual amongst prefixing languages in marking A and S as prefixes, but O as a suffix.

Secondly, some Australian languages have many simple inflecting verbs and few complex verbs, while others have few simple inflecting verbs and large numbers of complex verbs. Ngan'gityemerri is of the latter type. One of its most distinctive typological features, shared by many languages in northern parts of Western Australia and the Northern Territory, is that it has only a handful of simple inflecting verbs, and thousands of ‘complex verbs’ made up of two component lexical elements.