Subordination

AbstractThis chapter presents an overview of the various subordination strategies employed in Australian languages. Australian-style subordination is known for its remarkable uniformity in two respects: (i) the use of a single subordinate clause type for both relative and adverbial functions, (ii) the strong preference for dependent clauses to appear at the edges of the main clause. Despite these two widespread properties, however, Australian languages display a broad variety of subordination structures, including complementizers, nominalized verbs, non-finite verbs with subordination markers, and case-marking on verbs as a clause-linking device. Overt subordination morphology tends to be more elaborated in the Pama-Nyungan than in the polysynthetic non-Pama-Nyungan languages. Polysynthetic languages have often been assumed to lack subordinate structures, but in Australia it is perfectly possible for a polysynthetic language to possess a range of subordinate structures. Hence subordination and polysynthesis are in principle independent dimensions of typological variation.