Alyawarr Verb Morphology David Campbell Moore, Bachelor of Arts (Honours). This thesis is presented for the degree Master of Arts of the University of Western Australia. School: Social Sciences. Discipline: Linguistics. Thesis submitted in 2012 1 2 Abstract The Alyawarr Language Region is located in the Sandover and Barkly areas of the Northern Territory. Alyawarr is a language with around 2000 first language speakers. Although the Alyawarr language has been studied since the 1930s, only recently has long-term detailed fieldwork been undertaken in Alyawarr. Alyawarr verbs are agglutinative, suffixing and compounding. Alyawarr is in rich inflectional and derivational morphology. One significant category is Motion. Chapter One is an introduction to the Alyawarr language and reviews the literature on the language. Verb roots and types of word formation are explored in Chapter 2. Subsequent chapters explore different categories which follow the verb root. Chapter 3 covers Derivation and Number. Chapter 4 explores the categories of Motion and Aspect. Chapter 5 is dedicated to the inflectional categories of Tense and Mood and to complex clauses. This research represents seventeen years of research in the Alyawarr language based upon extensive text collections and data elicitation. Although this thesis builds on that of Stanham (1972), Turtle (n.d) and Yallop (1977), it contains new perspectives on understanding the Alyawarr verb and further refines previous analyses. This thesis is also distinctive and interesting because of further detailed information about reduplication in Alyawarr. Basic Motion verbs are explained and the category of Motion including an account of vertical motion. Another feature of this thesis is an exploration of the aspectual system of Alyawarr and its relationship to the categories of tense and mood along with a number of hitherto undescribed inflections. 3 Table of Contents Table of Contents ..................................................................................................... 4 Acknowledgements .................................................................................................. 7 Table of Abbreviations ............................................................................................. 8 Figures ................................................................................................................... 11 Tables .................................................................................................................... 11 1 Introduction .................................................................................................... 14 1.1 The Alyawarr language region............................................................................. 14 1.2 Classification of the Alyawarr language ............................................................... 14 1.2.1 Typological features of the Alyawarr language .................................................................... 15 1.2.2 Thesis orthography: Sounds and their representation in Alyawarr ...................................... 15 1.3 Review of Linguistic Research in the Alyawarr language ...................................... 17 1.3.1 Early Research: Wordlists ..................................................................................................... 18 1.3.2 Anthropological research in the Alyawarr region ................................................................. 19 1.3.3 Professional Linguistic Research from 1930 ......................................................................... 19 1.3.4 Verb morphology .................................................................................................................. 22 1.4 Linguistic Variation ............................................................................................. 22 1.5 Social context of the language ............................................................................ 23 1.5.1 Wider contacts with other languages of Central Australia ................................................... 23 1.5.2 Mutual intelligibility and relatedness of Alyawarr dialects ................................................... 25 1.5.3 Speakership and language ownership .................................................................................. 27 1.5.4 Areal Features ....................................................................................................................... 27 1.6 Language change ................................................................................................ 28 1.6.1 The profile of Alyawarr in Central Australia .......................................................................... 28 1.6.2 Mobility ................................................................................................................................. 28 1.6.3 Demographics ....................................................................................................................... 29 1.6.4 Alyawarr and English ............................................................................................................. 30 1.6.5 The influence of literacy and education ............................................................................... 30 1.6.6 Two way education ............................................................................................................... 31 1.6.7 The influence of media ......................................................................................................... 31 1.7 The data and sources .......................................................................................... 32 1.7.1 Participant observation ......................................................................................................... 32 1.7.2 Types of data ......................................................................................................................... 32 1.7.3 Texts ...................................................................................................................................... 33 1.7.4 Genre .................................................................................................................................... 33 1.7.5 Elicitation .............................................................................................................................. 34 1.7.6 Observed speech................................................................................................................... 35 1.7.7 Translations ........................................................................................................................... 35 1.7.8 Introspective comments of speakers .................................................................................... 35 1.7.9 Learning the Alyawarr language ........................................................................................... 36 1.7.10 The roles of language consultants .................................................................................... 37 1.7.11 Recording techniques ....................................................................................................... 38 1.8 The outline and scope of this work...................................................................... 38 2 The Alyawarr Verb........................................................................................... 39 4 2.1 Introduction ....................................................................................................... 39 2.2 Verb structure .................................................................................................... 39 2.3 Properties of Verb Roots: Transitivity .................................................................. 40 2.4 Verbal Sub-categories ......................................................................................... 41 2.4.1 Basic Motion verbs ............................................................................................................... 42 2.4.2 Basic Stance verbs ................................................................................................................ 46 2.5 Compound Verbs ................................................................................................ 49 2.5.1 Other evidence for compound status .................................................................................. 50 2.5.2 Subclassification of compounding types .............................................................................. 53 2.5.3 Compounds based upon IV and TV ...................................................................................... 56 2.6 Verbal Reduplication .......................................................................................... 60 2.6.1 Semantics of reduplication and iconicity ............................................................................. 61 2.6.2 Pre-bases .............................................................................................................................. 62 2.6.3 RED.elp Attenuative ............................................................................................................. 64 2.6.4 RED.ep Frequentive .............................................................................................................. 67 3 Derivation and Number .................................................................................... 70 3.1 Introduction ......................................................................................................