This thesis is an investigation of case morphology in a mixed language,
Gurindji Kriol. Gurindji Kriol is spoken by the Gurindji people in northern
Australia. It fuses Gurindji, which is a member of the Ngumpin-Yapa
subgroup of the Pama-Nyungan family, with Kriol, which is an
English-lexifier creole spoken across the north of Australia. Gurindji
Kriol exhibits a structural split between the NP and VP systems, but is
lexically quite mixed. Kriol provides much of the verbal grammar including
tense and mood auxiliaries, and transitive, aspect and derivational
morphology. Most of the NP structure is of Gurindji origin including case
and derivational morphology. Lexically, nominals and verbs are derived from
both source languages. In form, the various sub-systems of Gurindji Kriol
bear a close resemblance to their source languages. However, contact and
competition between Gurindji and Kriol in the process of the formation of
the mixed language has altered the function and distribution of these
systems, including the Gurindji-derived case morphology. The aim of this
thesis is three-fold: (i) to provide the first detailed socio-historical
and grammatical description of Gurindji Kriol (§2 and §A1), (ii) to propose
a path by which Gurindji case morphology was incorporated into the Gurindji
Kriol clause (§3-§5), and (iii) to demonstrate changes in the use of four
case markers quantitatively (§6-§9).
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