View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by The Australian National University This version: 2017; Some minor changes to formatting may have been made. CREATING NEW WORDS IN GAMILARAAY AND YUWAALARAAY Gianbattista (John) Giacon A thesis submitted to the School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics of the University of New England, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honours in Linguistics November 2001 Declaration The work presented in this thesis is, to the best of my knowledge and belief, original except as acknowledged in the text. I hereby declare that I have not submitted this material, either in whole or in part, for a degree at this or any other university. ii Acknowledgements This thesis grew out of my work in Yuwaalaraay and Gamilaraay language revival. That work has depended on many people and I thank them. Uncle Ted Fields introduced me to Yuwaalaraay and shared with me the passion that he and others have for their language. The Gamilaraay - Yuwaalaraay informants and those who recorded them have provided much of the material used in the revival work on these languages. In particular I have worked with the tapes of Arthur Dodd and Fred Reece and Corinne Williams’ Grammar of Yuwaalaraay (1980). Peter Austin’s dictionaries provided a good introduction to this group of languages and to current orthography. This thesis has benefited from working with the many people involved in Gamilaraay - Yuwaalaraay programs. It has often been while working with them on school programs or songs or speeches that the need for new words has become obvious. The work of Steve Morelli with the Gumbaynggirr language provided a model for my work in Walgett. Steve Morelli, Anna Ash, Amanda Lissarague, Moy Hitchen, Marlene Scrimgeour and Louise Hercus commented on sections of drafts of the thesis. The Catholic Schools Office, Armidale and the Christian Brothers have sponsored and supported my work in Walgett since 1994. In particular the brothers who have lived and worked in Walgett have supported my work and study. Finally thanks to my supervisor, Nick Reid. His insightful comments and careful reading of drafts have added significantly to this work. iii Preface and abstract This work aims to develop strategies for forming new words in Gamilaraay and Yuwaalaraay, two languages from the north of New South Wales. It makes the premise that appropriate new words are formed according to three principles. Firstly the final decision about the adoption of proposed new words rests with Gamilaraay - Yuwaalaraay people. Secondly new words should be formed in the way traditional Gamilaraay - Yuwaalaraay formed new words. The third principle is to acknowledge that Gamilaraay - Yuwaalaraay (henceforth GY) are reviving languages in a situation where English is dominant. The first principle is discussed in 2.3 and has been used when new words have been adopted recently as part of GY revival. The main conclusions relating to the third principle are that borrowing from English is not a recommended strategy and that compounding and derivational word formation strategies are recommended because they produce words which are easier to learn. The second principle is the main focus of this work. Because there are no fluent GY speakers the grammar of GY word production has to be redeveloped. This involves both a review of historical sources and development of new grammar. The need for new words arises in the context of language revival, where new words are needed to talk about everyday concepts. The term ‘new word’ can be used in a number of ways. It can refer to a word rediscovered in the GY sources. It can mean a word created by derivational processes, but with predictable meaning. However in the context of this thesis ‘new word’ is normally used to refer to a consciously constructed word whose meaning is not recoverable from its component parts. Such a word has ‘idiosyncratic meaning’ in contrast to the ‘predictable meaning’ of many derivations. Sources of information about GY word production One source of information about GY word production is existing published GY grammatical material. This has a quite limited amount on word production processes such as nominalization. Word formation was not a main focus in previous grammatical work. iv A second source of word formation knowledge is the primary GY sources, including recently completed tape transcripts. Much of this thesis consists of examination of these sources. As a result a number of new word forming morphemes have been described. These include suffixes and bound morphemes found in compound words. A third source of information is languages closely related to GY. Much use is made of Donaldson’s Grammar of Wangaaybuwan (1980). It provides a starting point for the examination of much GY material. Other sources which provide some material include general works on lexical derivation, other grammars of Australian languages and material on word production in other languages which are being revived, such as Maori. Approaches adopted in the thesis The thesis makes a number of assumptions about word production grammar. One is that there is considerable information still to be found from the original sources. Another is that much can be learnt from a study of related languages, in particular the closely related ‘no- having’ languages (see 1.1.2.1). Another assumption is that for GY language revival to continue a ‘new GY’ grammar needs to develop. This thesis is, in a very limited way, programmatic, pointing out some areas for further investigation in GY (see e.g. 4.2.4) and in related languages. Knowledge about language can be in a codified form, in the rules and paradigms typical of published grammars. It can also be in instinctive form. This second is the knowledge that all fluent speakers have. The thesis, as well as listing a number of rules and morphemes, often gives many examples of them. This is to help develop a ‘feel’ for the language, some of the instinctual knowledge of the language. The thesis also gives many examples of potential new words. When it does that the aim is generally not to propose a particular word, but rather to illustrate a process. In fact often a v number of meanings is given for new words, and a number of new words are available to translate any given English word. Summary Chapter One provides background information. It begins with information about the languages, the GY people, and recent language revival efforts. A summary of GY grammar follows. The last section is a discussion of the information that is available about GY word formation, firstly in published grammars and then in original sources, especially the tapes. Chapter Two discusses principles for the formation of new GY words and the roles of the language owners and linguists in the formation and adoption of the words. Chapters Three to Five consider the main word formation strategies in detail. These are mainly derivational processes. Chapter Three is about the development of new verbs. It contains a section on Wangaaybuwan verb morphology since that has lead to increased understanding of GY verbs. The main strategy recommended for forming new verb stems is a specialized type of compounding (for other types of compounding see chapter five). This involves analysing many existing verbs as historical compounds and the description of a number of morphemes found in these compounds. These morphemes can then be used for forming new verb stems. Chapter Four considers strategies for the formation of new nominals. The first strategy is suffixation of existing nominals. New nominals can be formed with previously defined suffixes, newly defined suffixes and suffixes that can be borrowed from Wangaaybuwan. The second nominal-formation strategy considered is reduplication, which is quite common in GY. The third strategy is nominalisation of verbs. This can be used but is problematic since there are relatively few examples in the corpus. As well some verb ‘nominalising’ processes result in words whose syntax is not that of a simple nominal. vi Chapter Five considers other word formation strategies. The first of these is compounding other than the specialized verb compounding considered in Chapter three. The second is borrowing, and then a number of minor word formation strategies are considered. Compounding, and borrowing from Australian languages can be major sources of new words. Chapter Six summarizes the word formation strategies recommended. Appendix 1 is a list of Gamilaraay - Yuwaalaraay compound words. Appendix 2 is a list of reduplicated roots found in Gamilaraay - Yuwaalaraay. Appendix 3 is a list of Gamilaraay - Yuwaalaraay borrowings from English. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements iii Preface and abstract iv List of maps and tables xii Abbreviations and conventions xiii 1 Background to Gamilaraay - Yuwaalaraay Revival 1 1.1 Gamilaraay - Yuwaalaraay and related languages 1 1.1.1 The Gamilaraay - Yuwaalaraay area and languages 1 1.1.1.1 Language names and areas 1 1.1.1.2 Variation in Gamilaraay - Yuwaalaraay 3 1.1.1.3 Information about the languages 4 1.1.2 Languages neighbouring Gamilaraay - Yuwaalaraay 5 1.1.2.1 The related ‘no-having’ languages 6 1.1.3 The Gamilaraay - Yuwaalaraay language sources 9 1.1.4 Contact History 10 1.1.5 Recent Gamilaraay - Yuwaalaraay language revival 12 1.1.5.1 Language revival programs 12 1.1.5.2 Changes in the use of GY 13 1.1.5.3 Factors influencing Gamilaraay - Yuwaalaraay language revival