A description of Nyigina : a language of the West Kimberley, Western Australia

Abstract

Nyigina is a highly agglutinative "prefixing" Australian language without noun classification. Verbal affixing is complex. Verbal prefixing includes specification of the person and number of the subject but does not include any direct specification of the direct object, which may be represented by pronominal suffixing. Two complete sets of verbal prefixes, which have a semantic basis, are found in Nyigina and throughout the language subgroup. Nominal suffixing is also extensive and a series of nominal suffixes may occur on a single nominal. This thesis introduces the phonology briefly and deals at length with the language's morphology. The complex morphology provides the means of expressing considerable semantic subtlety and also many syntactic relationships. This thesis does not provide a comprehensive description of many areas of syntax. Many examples are included throughout and a short text is presented in Appendix A. Appendix B consists of word lists illustrating possessive nominal prefixing in various members of the language subgroup. Show more