Managing expectations

One of the central goals of human language is to convey intended messages successfully to the addressee. However, communication inherently involves uncertainty or unexpectedness which hinders this delivery. Different languages have different strategies to manage unexpectedness. In this article, we explore the strategies used in Murrinhpatha, an Australian Aboriginal language with highly flexible syntax, that is, free constituent order and frequent NP omission. We argue that Murrinhpatha speakers utilise the language’s syntactic flexibility to manage referential expectations. Highly unexpected referents tend to be expressed preverbally, while expected referents which need to be ‘reinforced’ are usually expressed postverbally. Uniquely expected referents are usually syntactically omitted. We argue that expectation and uncertainty provide a more convincing account of Murrinhpatha compared to an account of accessibility. Our findings shed new light on several aspects of syntactically flexible languages, including pragmatic salience and newsworthiness, and the functional distinction between postverbal NPs and NP omission.