Information structure and its morphosyntactic resources in Marori

This paper will discuss information structure in Marori (Also known as Morori/Moraori; ISO 39-3: mok; a subgroup-level isolate, TNG/Papuan, highly endangered, with 16 fluent speakers), focusing on alternative realisations of clausal dependents, which correlate with their pragmatic functions, and the morphosyntactic resources so employed. Findings from natural texts confirm that the head-final structure (S-V/A-P-V) is the unmarked structure in Marori, and that different nominal types have different pragmatic distributions. Overt pronominal and non-pronominal NPs serve as primary/reintroduced topics (TOP) and as secondary as well as contrastive TOP/FOC(us). Continuing TOP is, however, expressed by verbal agreement with elided NPs. Generic reference must be expressed overtly by a non-pronominal NP and shows rigid word order. The paper is organised as follows. An overview of information structure in section 2 is followed in section 3 by an outline of Marori clausal morphosyntax to give the reader some understanding of the resources made available for information structure (i-str) in this language. Discourse functions in Marori are described in detail in section 4, with concluding remarks in section 5