Panyjima phonology and morphology.

Abstract

Panyjima is a Pama-Nyungan language of the Ngayarda subgroup (Fn. 1), originally spoken in the tablelands of the Hammersly Range in the Pilbara region of Western Australia. Today most of the remaining speakers of the language, who number approximately sixty, live in the coastal town of Onslow. Others live in Rocbourne and Witnoom and on a number of pastoral leases in the Hammersly area. 1.1 linguistic Type Panyjima is in many ways typical of the suffixing languages of Western Australia. The phoneme inventory is typically Australian. There arc six points of articulation for stops and nasals with both a laminal and an apical contrast. There are four laterals, corresponding to the non-peripheral stops, two glides and two rhotics. There are three short vowels, and three long vowels of rare occcurrencc. Nouns and adjectives cannot be distinguished on morphological grounds. Nominals take number and other derivational suffixes, and a set of inflectional case markers. Verbs take inflectional markers of tense, aspect, mood and voice. A three way number distinction operates in the pronoun paradigm and an inclusive/exclusive distinction operates for non-singular first person, The first and second person non-singular pronouns also code certain kin relationships between the speaker and the address~e(s). Panyjima (and other languages of the Ngayarda subgroup) differ most markedly fron other Australian languages in having a normative/ accusative case marking system with a productive syntactic passive. It is clear, however, that this system has evolved out of an earlier ergative case marking system. Show more