School of Languages and Linguistics - Theses
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ItemA sketch grammar of the Badjala language of Gari (Fraser Island)( 2003)This thesis is a sketch grammar of the Badjala language of Gari (Fraser Island), and is the result of a fresh transcription and analyses of taped material recorded by Professor Stephen Wurm (now deceased), in 1955, 1960 and 1962 with Gaiarbau, the main informant and one of the last speakers of Badjala. These recorded sessions were conducted on Stradbroke Island and Brisbane, before this elderly man passed away in 1964. All of this material was entered into a computer database, and many examples from this corpus are included within the body of the thesis. Relevant sections from this material is contained in the appendices to this thesis, in the form of sentence examples in Badjala with a free English translation, as well as an alphabetically arranged Badjala wordlist. The thesis comprises five chapters. Chapter 1 deals with The language and its speakers, referring to the historical situation, the spelling of language names, the present language custodians, and the scope of the present study. It also discusses the linguistic type of the language, its relationship to other languages in the region and previous work carried out on Badjala. Chapter 2 analyses the phonetics and phonology of the language. Chapter 3 is concerned with nominal morphology (including the case system). Nominals, nouns, personal pronouns, interrogatives, demonstratives, locational qualifiers and adjectives. Adverbs and particles are also dealt with in this chapter. Chapter 4 is concerned with the morphology and tense, aspect and mode inflections of verbs in Badjala, as well as the derivational morphology of verbs. Finally Chapter 5 examines the syntax of this language, including the main clause, the structure of the noun phrase, and the syntax of complex clauses.