Marrithiyel : a language of the Daly River region of Australia's Northern Territory

Abstract

This is a study of Marrithiyel, a language of the Daly River region of the Northern Territory. Chapter One presents a brief introduction to the language and its speakers, and outlines my fieldwork methodology. Chapter Two then reviews the phonology, word classes, and the nominal case marking system. These matters are not treated exhaustively, but are rather presented as preliminaries to a study of the verb, the topic to which the major part of this thesis is devoted. Chapter Three is primarily concerned with the morphology of pronominal verbal affixes. This chapter introduces the basic verbal constituents: the auxiliary, the complex verb stem, the boundpronominal number markers, and the tense/mood suffixes. The bound pronominals of the auxiliary are identified, and their various functions (including person, number, core role, tense/mood, and transitivity marking) outlined. Three further sets of pronominals, able to appear at a subsequent position in the verb, encoding more peripheral roles, are also examined. Chapter Four deals with the tense/aspect/mood distinctions carried by the verb, outlining the seven major tense/mood categories, and analysing the aspectual role of the intransitive auxiliaries. The incorporation into the verb of a number of temporal modifiers, tense/mood suffixing of certain non-verbal constituents, and iterative verb-root reduplication are also considered. Chapter Five investigates the incorporation of noun roots into the verb, a process primarily involving a restricted set of body part terms. Two types of incorporation, "lexical" and "syntactic", are distinguished, and the domain and effect of each type of incorporation looked at in detail. The semantic range of body part terms, which may be incorporated in either literal or classificatory senses, is surveyed, and a number of verb stem derivations involving body part terms are presented. Chapter Six examines the semantic contribution made by the auxiliary to overall verbal meaning. Three groups of auxiliaries, the "major transitive", the "major intransitive", and the "minors", are identified and discussed. The major transitives are analysed as essentially instrumental in semantic character, while the major intransitives are seen as having more of a postural-aspectual function. Detailed exemplification is given throughout, and there is an illustrative text provided at the end of this study.