We Have a New Site!
With the help of your donations we have been making good progress on designing and launching our new website! Check it out at https://linguistlist.org/!***We are still in our beta stages for the new site--if you have any feedback, be sure to let us know at webdevlinguistlist.org***
Dissertation Information
| Title: | A Grammar of Kuuk Thaayorre | Add Dissertation |
| Author: | Alice Gaby | Update Dissertation |
| Email: | click here to access email | |
| Homepage: | http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/people/fac/gaby.html | |
| Institution: | University of Melbourne, Department of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics | |
| Completed in: | 2006 | |
| Linguistic Subfield(s): | General Linguistics; Language Documentation; | |
| Subject Language(s): |
Thayore
|
|
| Language Family(ies): |
Pama-Nyungan |
|
| Director(s): |
Stephen Levinson Rachel Nordlinger Nicholas Enfield Nicholas Evans |
|
| Abstract: | The 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 in 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. At the level of morphology, Kuuk Thaayorre is one of the very few languages demonstrated to possess phrasal affixation; the irregularity of Thaayorre ergative case inflection proves the ergative morpheme to be a suffix, yet only the final nominal of the noun phrase is inflected. The syntactic combination of words into phrases and clauses reveals a predominantly nonconfigurational language which nevertheless has a highly structured noun phrase. Of particular theoretical significance, is the complex encoding of arguments by apposed noun phrases, free pronouns and incipient enclitic pronouns. Kuuk Thaayorre is also unusual in possessing multiple distinct inclusory constructions, including a set of inclusory pronouns that encode separate superset and subset within a single lexeme. Kuuk Thaayorre possesses myriad polyfunctional, homophonous and polysemous forms. Of particular interest here is the exploitation of morphosyntactic categories for pragmatic purposes (e.g. the use of spatial distinctions in demonstratives to express how easily the referent is retrievable, or the use of ergative case-marking to signal whether or not the subject’s reference is expected). The fact that Kuuk Thaayorre is one of the few traditional Australian indigenous languages still being learned by children and used in daily interactions allows us the rare opportunity to explore such pragmatic concerns alongside the grammatical structures through which they are expressed. |
|
|
About LINGUIST
|
Contact Us
|
Report Broken Link
While the LINGUIST List makes every effort to ensure the linguistic relevance of sites listed on its pages, it cannot vouch for their contents. |