A description of the Emmi language of the Northern Territory of Australia

Abstract

This thesis provides the first detailed description of Emmi, a dying language spoken by about two dozen adults who are based at Belyuen on the Cox Peninsula west of Darwin. Chapter One first explains the geographical, historical and social context of the language and its speakers. It describes my fieldwork methodology, and provides an overview of the Emmi language and its typological singularities. It provides a critique of earlier work on the language and summarises what is known about the relationship of Emmi to neighbouring languages. Chapter Two describes the segmental phonology of the language. It provides evidence for the existence of a voicing contrast between stops and the existence of two phonemic fricatives. It shows how the stress patterns of complex morphemes which have been subsumed into the verb reveal that they were once independent words. Chapter Three describes the nominal morphology of the language, with particular reference to the role of adnominal enclitics as NP relators. It explains the function of the generic nouns awa 'meat' and miya 'edible plant, the five ways used to express the possessive relation, and the overlap between adjectives and nouns on the one hand, and adjectives and verbs on the other. Chapter Four explains verb structure, and analyses the morphology of the obligatory components: auxiliary verb, coverbs, bound pronominals, bound number words. Chapter Five examines the possible combinations of auxiliary and coverb and works out the semantic and syntactic motivations for cooccurrence. Chapter Six describes nominal incorporation, distinguishing between lexical and syntactic incorporation and showing how lexically incorporated bodyparts function as metaphors and classifiers for entities v1ith the same shape as the bodypart. Chapter Seven describes the functions of the fourteen propositional enclitics. Chapter Eight describes the syntax of simple and complex clauses with particular focus on serial ronstructions. It shows how the major intransitive auxiliary verbs have been polygrammaticised to provide aspectual information. Appendix A comprises Basedow's word-lists of the language, dating from 1906. Appendix B gives Capell's raw Ami data, dating from the 1950s. Appendix C sets out the auxiliary verb paradigms. Appendix D consists of six texts.