Number Marking in the Daly Languages (Australia)

In this paper, presented as part of the workshop on the morphosyntax of number marking, I discuss subject and object number marking in languages of the Daly region of the Northern Territory of Australia, especially Ngan'gityemerri and Murrinh-Patha. In these languages number is frequently marked by multiple elements distributed throughout the verbal word. I argue that the interpretation of number marking needs to take into account the full morphological context in which it appears, causing difficulties for the constructed number analysis of Arka (2011) (as well as the disjunctive approach of Nordlinger (2011)).