Goddard, Cliff
Description
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...[Show more] 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.
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