How can different word orders express the same meaning in Pama-Nyungan languages?

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Distinctive features of Australia's Indigenous languages — Australian Aboriginal languages A discussion of the languages of Indigenous Australians.

In Pama-Nyungan languages, different word orders can express the same meaning because these languages utilize a system of inflection and case marking rather than relying on fixed word order to establish syntactic coherence.1

Unlike English, where word order is essential to identify the subject and object, Pama-Nyungan languages use specific suffixes to clarify grammatical roles. For instance, an ergative suffix is attached to nouns to identify the actor of a transitive verb, while accusative suffixes are used for personal pronouns in the object position.1

Because these markers explicitly define the relationships between words, the components of a sentence—such as the subject, verb, and object—can be placed in virtually any order without changing the intended meaning. For example, the words for "big," "man," "see," and "you" can be arranged in any sequence, and the listener will still understand that the "big man" is the one performing the action of seeing the "you".1