Tracking a ‘novel’ first person subject pronoun within PamaNyungan: From north-west Queensland to the Western Australian coast

Abstract

Among Jane Simpson’s many and diverse contributions to our knowledge of Pama-Nyungan (PN) languages are her reconstructions of the ancestral pronoun inventories of proto Thura-Yura (Simpson and Hercus 2004) and of pre-Warumungu (Simpson 2008). Simpson (2008, 76) reconstructs the pre-Warumungu first person singular Nominative pronoun as *-(a)rn and notes its correspondence with the subject bound pronoun -rna widespread in Nyungic languages to the west, and also with the Nominative free pronoun ngarna in Warluwaric (renamed Ngarna by Breen 2004) languages to the east, as well as with bound pronoun forms derived from ngarna, namely Yanyuwa -arna and Wakaya -arn. Simpson speculates that the Wakaya form may have been the source of the Warumungu first person singular Nominative pronoun. In this chapter, I attempt to track down all plausible reflexes in Pama Nyungan languages of a first person singular Nominative pronoun cognate with *ngarna in order to establish its place relative to the reconstructed proto-Pama-Nyungan (pPN) case-paradigm of first person singular pronouns. Within the same set of languages, I compare the mostly parallel history of the first person singular pronoun paradigm with Nominative *ngarna with the second person singular paradigm with the Nominative form derived from proto pPN *nyin.1 I then compare the Nyungic bound pronoun case paradigms, which strongly reflect pPN free pronoun case paradigms, with the weak reflexes of these in Nyungic free pronoun paradigms from which the reflexes of Nominative *ngarna and *nyin are mostly absent. Finally, I address what light the picture that emerges sheds on the prehistory of Pama-Nyungan. Show more