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In languages which encode information about multiple pronominal arguments on adjacent slots on the verb, it is unusual for the subject and object forms to be learnable in isolation, and the two morpheme slots are frequently merged. The resultant set of combinations typically lies somewhere between an irregular paradigm and a set of forms derivable by combining subject and object elements according to some set of rules. These paradigms are potentially vast - in Dalabon, which has a rich set of person, number and kinship categories in its pronoun system, there are 115 possible subject/object combinations, each of which further distinguishes six tense/aspect/mood categories.
Most such languages reduce the number of forms by widespread homophony or polysemy (cf Heath 1991). By and large, however, the recent upsurge of interest in polysemy by semanticists has neglected this phenomemon, so that it is not always clear, for example, whether the formal collapse is accidental homophony or principled polysemy. In this paper I offer an analysis that reveals systematic polysemy in such systems in two closely-related north Australian languages, Mayali and Dalabon, both polysynthetic languages whose verbs take obligatory pronominal prefixes for subject and object. I will argue that if the informational structure of the paradigm is correctly analysed, and appropriate rules of semantic referral (or regular polysemy) are formulated, it becomes possible to account for this very complex paradigm on the basis of a relatively small set of rules that generate a basic form set, supplemented by several layers of semantic referral rules that retrieve forms already generated for other semantic combinations.
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