A Grammar of Wanyjirra, a language of Northern Australia

Abstract

This thesis is a comprehensive description of Wanyjirra, a moribund Ngumpin-Yapa language originally spoken in the south-west Victoria River District of the Northern Territory, Australia. Based on elicited data and narratives recorded between 2009 and 2012 and legacy materials, this grammar details the phonetics and phonology (chapter 2), word classes and general case functions (chapter 3), nominal morphology (chapter 4), free pronouns and interrogatives (chapter 5), demonstratives and directionals (chapter 6), pronominal clitics (chapter 7), noun phrases (chapter 8), verbal morphology (chapter 9), simple and complex predicates (chapter 10), other minor word classes and clitics (chapter 11), the syntax of simple sentences (chapter 12) and subordination and coordination (chapter13). It also provides a profile of the language and its speakers, including comparisons with neighbouring languages, a short description of special language styles and information about previous work on the language, methodology and characteristics of data (chapter 1). Wanyjirra is, in most aspects, typical of Pama-Nyungan languages and, as a language in the centre of the dialect chain, shows many similarities to other Ngumpin-Yapa languages. However, it possesses distinct features and merged features of its neighbours. The data also shows many dialectal or idiolectal variations in synchronic or diachronic context.

The phoneme inventory contains five short vowels, one long vowel and seventeen consonants with a rich series of liquids but without fricatives. Syllables are mostly simple but can have complex codas only in coverb and adverb word classes. Lenition and nasal coda dissimilation are common morphophonemic processes especially in case and derivational allomorphy.

Wanyjirra is a non-configurational language having grammatically flexible ordering of constituents and frequent ellipsis of argument NPs, which are cross-referenced by pronominal clitics. Constituent order is influenced by pragmatic salience and new and important information is often placed in initial position. Discontinuous NPs are not common and have specific discourse functions.

The language is an agglutinative and suffixing language with a complex system of case marking. As is crosslinguistically unusual but relatively common among Australian languages, case suffixes do not only represent grammatical and semantic roles of NPs but also link two NPs and/or link two clauses. The language shows a split marking between nouns/adjectives and free pronouns: nouns/adjectives take an absolutive-ergative declension whereas free pronouns make no morphological distinction between transitive subjects (A), intransitive subject (S) and transitive (direct) objects (O). Pronominal clitics, which show a nominative-accusative pattern, cross-reference core and non-core arguments constrained by animacy, sentiency and affectedness of referents.

Wanyjirra discourse largely consists of strings of simple sentences with nominal or verbal predicates. It has only thirty-eight inflecting verbs functioning as simple predicates but some stems combine with coverbs, constituting a distinct word class, to form complex verbs. Although verbal clauses usually contain finite inflecting verbs, non-finite forms of inflecting verbs and coverbs can also occur as main predicates without finite verbs in discourse. Finite and non-finite subordinations essentially contain independent subordinators and finite verbs, and non-finite verbs or coverbs followed by subordinating suffixes respectively. Coordination is not morphologically indicated. Show more