Constraints on subject elision in northern Australian Kriol: Between discourse and syntax

Kriol is an English-lexified creole spoken throughout the northern regions of Australia since the beginning of the twentieth century. With documentation and description of the language commencing only in the later decades of the twentieth century, many aspects of Kriol grammar remain under-described, especially within the domains of syntax and pragmatics. This study documents and describes subject elision in Kriol, a process where subject NPs are elided in a range of syntactic and discourse contexts. Through qualitative methods we describe the environments wherein subjects are elided and consider the relationship between elision licensed by the syntactic context, and elision licensed by the discourse context. The analysis reveals that subject elision can be licensed through antecedent–anaphora relations at the level of syntax and through the encoding of unambiguous, continued topics following the beginning of a narrative episode at the level of discourse. We then consider the role of substrate and lexifier sources to account for how subject elision categories may have arisen in Kriol.