School of Languages and Linguistics - Theses
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ItemAgreement in Mawng: productive and lexicalised uses of agreement in an Australian language( 2006-10)This thesis is a morphosyntactic description of the Australian language Mawng with a focus on verbal gender agreement and its lexicalisation. Mawng’s five genders have a strong semantic basis. In verbs with lexicalised agreement, a verbal pronominal prefix that usually indexes a core argument of a particular gender instead functions to specify a particular sense of the verb. Such verbs form a significant portion of the verbal lexicon in Mawng. An investigation of these verbs requires an updated description of Mawng, which has not been the object of linguistic study for some time. A non-Pama Nyungan language of the Iwaidjan language family, Mawng is still spoken by around three hundred people living on the north-west coast of Arnhem land, Northern Territory, Australia. This description is based on new fieldwork carried out at Warruwi (Goulburn Island) and adds to what was previously known about the Mawng language. Complex verb constructions, reciprocal constructions, argument structure, complex sentences, NP structure, the semantic basis of the gender system and the nature of verbal agreement are some of the topics explored in greater detail in this thesis than previously available materials. Lexicalised agreement was not discussed in previous work on Mawng.
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ItemThe inclusory construction in Australian languages( 2001-11)A typological work, comparing the inclusory construction across Australian languages.
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ItemA Grammar of Kuuk Thaayorre( 2006-07)This thesis is a comprehensive description of Kuuk Thaayorre, a Paman language spoken on the west coast of Cape York Peninsula, Australia. On the basis of elicited data, narrative and semi-spontaneous conversation recorded between 2002 and 2005, this grammar details the phonetics and phonology, morphosyntax, lexical and constructional semantics and pragmatics of one of the few indigenous Australian languages still used as a primary means of communication. Kuuk Thaayorre possesses features of typological interest at each of these levels. At the phonological level, Kuuk Thaayorre possesses a particularly rich vowel inventory from an Australian perspective, with five distinct vowel qualities and two contrastive lengths producing ten vowel phonemes. It is in the phonotactic combination of sounds that Kuuk Thaayorre phonology is particularly noteworthy, however. Kuuk Thaayorre’s tendency towards closed syllables (with codas containing up to three consonants) frequently leads to consonant clusters of as many as four segments. Kuuk Thaayorre is also cross-linguistically unusual in allowing sequences of its two rhotics (an alveolar tap/trill and retroflex continuant) within the syllable – either as a complex coda or as onset plus syllabic rhotic. Finally, monosyllables are ubiquitous across all Thaayorre word classes, despite being generally rare in Australian languages.
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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.