A semantically-oriented grammar of the Yankunytjatjara dialect of the Western Desert language

Abstract

The Western Desert Language is a fairly typical Pama- Nyungan language, spoken in the arid western interior of Australia; it is suffixing and agglutinative, with a well-developed case system and a fairly free but basically verb-final word-order. Chapter 1 outlines my fieldwork methodology and semantic approach, and the physical and socio-cultural setting of the Yankunytjatjara dialect. Chapter 2 briefly describes its segmental phonology and some preliminary matters such as parts of speech. The bulk of the thesis describes the morphosyntax in a fairly informal typologically-oriented fashion, with an emphasis on semantics. The treatment of case in Chapter 3 is based on the traditional distinction between a category and its marking, and on the traditional concept of a case as a substitution class. This leads me to recognise three core case categories — an A case (ergative), an 0 case (accusative) and an S case (nominative), despite the fact that they are realised differently with nouns (nominative=accusative) and pronouns (nominative=ergative). This interpretation allows an elegant statement of the structure of certain NP types, such as those involving inalienable possession and group inclusion, and of a pervasive case agreement rule whereby manner-like nominals (active adjectives) agree in case with the actor/subject NP. Non-pronominal case-markers are shown to be portmanteau morphemes, signalling name-status as well as case. Purposive and locative cases are each treated in some detail, showing the semantic interrelatedness of their uses (including the genitive use of purposive case, and the instrumental use of locative case). The 'local' cases (allative, ablative and perlative) are treated more briefly. Chapter 4 deals with NP structure, demonstratives, free and clitic pronouns, nominal derivation and an interesting class of suffixes (relators) showing intention, deprivation, sequential action and control (’having1), which display the actor agreement pattern of case inflection. Chapter 5 begins with nominalisation and goes on to describe how subordination and relativisation are achieved by adding case or relator suffixes to nominalised clauses; also discussed is the ’switch-reference’ specification in the semantic structure of purposive and circumstantial (background) clauses. Chapter 6 deals with verbal inflection, highlighting a perfective/imperfective aspectual contrast in certain tense/mood categories. Adopting a system of intermediate (augmented) stems simplifies the formal description of the paradigms for the four conjugational classes. Chapter 6 also discusses several types of serial verb construction within the Foley/Van Valin typology of clause juncture. Verbal derivation and compounding are treated in Chapter 7; and miscellaneous topics such as negation, temporal and spatial expressions, interrogatives and adverbs in Chapter 8. Chapter 9 begins with sentence connectives (including a discussion of a switch-reference contrast) and proceeds with a fairly detailed survey of free and clitic particles. The final chapter briefly describes some speech registers, the auxiliary language anitji and other matters relating to language use. There is detailed exemplification throughout, and eleven accompanying texts in the Appendix.