ABSTRACT
This paper argues that word order in Navajo is determined by discourse structure rather than by grammatical relations. There is a preverbal focus position, in which strong pronouns and contrastively focused NPs must occur, and, before that, an optional topic position. The authors argue that the need for pronominal arguments in Navajo verbs is a direct consequence of this discourse configurationality: Pronominal arguments satisfy the argument structure requirements of the verb and are coindexed with overt topic and focus NPs in a constrained fashion. Evidence for this proposal includes the mandatory coindexing of pronominal arguments in adjoined clauses with those of main clauses—required because the discourse structure applies to both sets of pronominal arguments. Other evidence brought to bear involves the relationship of word order to the direct/inverse alternation, the unavailability of generic interpretations of topic NPs in inverse constructions, the animacy hierarchy, and the difference between cliticdoubled indefinites in pro -drop languages and indefinites with pronominal arguments in discourse configurational languages. The picture painted here gives the Pronominal Argument Hypothesis a concrete connection with a syntactic view of discourse structure that bears directly on later developments in the expansion of the left periphery, notably Rizzi’s 1997 paper, “The Fine Structure of the Left Periphery”, and subsequent work.
