Radical non-configurationality without shuffle operators: An analysis of Wambaya

The word order facts of radically non-configurational languages pose a challenge to HPSGapproaches which assume both that the surface order of words is the yield of the (tectogrammatical)tree and standard HPSG-style cancellation of valence lists. These languages allow discontinuous nounphrases, in which modifiers appear separated from their head nouns by arbitrarily many other wordsfrom the same clause. In this paper, I explore an analysis which preservestectogrammatical-phenogrammatical equivalence, and accounts for the word order facts of Wambaya withan analysis based on non-cancellation. This analysis is contrasted with other approaches todiscontinuous constituents and analyses of other phenomena based on non-cancellation. Finally, Iexplore the implications for current models of semantic compositionality.