ABSTRACT

Kriol is an English-lexified creole spoken throughout the northern regions of Australia since the beginning of the twentieth century. With documentation and description of the language commencing only in the later decades of the twentieth century, many aspects of Kriol grammar remain under-described, especially within the domains of syntax and pragmatics. This study documents and describes subject elision in Kriol, a process where subject NPs are elided in a range of syntactic and discourse contexts. Through qualitative methods we describe the environments wherein subjects are elided and consider the relationship between elision licensed by the syntactic context, and elision licensed by the discourse context. The analysis reveals that subject elision can be licensed through antecedent–anaphora relations at the level of syntax and through the encoding of unambiguous, continued topics following the beginning of a narrative episode at the level of discourse. We then consider the role of substrate and lexifier sources to account for how subject elision categories may have arisen in Kriol.

摘要

Kriol 是自 20 世纪初以来在澳大利亚北部地区使用的英语词汇克里奥尔语。随着对语言的记录和描述仅在 20 世纪后期才开始，Kriol 语法的许多方面仍未得到充分描述，尤其是在句法和语用学领域。本研究记录并描述了 Kriol 中的主题省略，这是一个在一系列句法和话语上下文中省略主题 NP 的过程。通过定性方法，我们描述了主语被省略的环境，并考虑了句法上下文许可的省略与话语上下文许可的省略之间的关系。分析表明，主语省略可以通过句法级别的先行词-回指关系以及在话语级别的叙事情节开始后对明确的、持续的主题进行编码来获得许可。然后，我们考虑基质和词汇源的作用，以解释主题省略类别如何在 Kriol 中出现。