Patrick McConvell

Felicity Meakins

Gurindji is a Pama-Nyungan language of north-central Australia. It is a member of the Ngumpin subgroup which forms a part of the Ngumpin-Yapa group. The phonology is typically Pama-Nyungan; the phoneme inventory contains five places of articulation for stops which have corresponding nasals. It also has three laterals, two rhotics and three vowels. There are no fricatives and, among the stops, voicing is not phonemically distinctive. One striking morpho-phonological process is a nasal cluster dissimilation (NCD) rule. Gurindji is morphologically agglutinative and suffixing, exhibiting a mix of dependent-marking and head-marking. Nominals pattern according to an ergative system and bound pronouns show an accusative pattern. Gurindji marks a further 10 cases. Free and bound pronouns distinguish person (1st inclusive and exclusive, 2nd and 3rd) and three numbers (minimal, unit augmented and augmented). The Gurindji verb complex consists of an inflecting verb and coverb. Inflecting verbs belong to a closed class of 34 verbs which are grammatically obligatory. Coverbs form an open class, numbering in the hundreds and carrying the semantic weight of the complex verb.

As spoken by Violet Wadrill, Ronnie Wavehill, Dandy Danbayarri, Biddy Wavehill, Topsy Dodd Ngarnjal, Long Johnny Kijngayarri, Banjo Ryan, Pincher Nyurrmiari and Blanche Bulngari

A Grammar of Gurindji

Nicholas Evans

This book brings together exciting new work in archaeology, linguistics and genetics to reveal a varied and dynamic view of Australia's Aboriginal past, and its place in the prehistory of the Pacific region. Each discipline provides some pieces of the jigsaw: put these together and a fullerpicture emerges. To the dates and excavations of archaeology we can fit linguistic models of cultural contact and spread, and genetic evidence for past patterns of marriage and migration. Alll three disciplines point to sweeping changes in the mid-Holocene, linked to expansion of the Pama-Nyunganlanguage family over most of the continent. The book includes introductory chapters surveying the methods and current state of knowledge in each contributing discipline as well as sections dealing with regional patterns within Australia; culture contact; the Pama-Nyungan question; and the broaderAsia-Pacific perspective

Aboriginal Australia in Global Perspective

Archaeology and Linguistics

Richard A. Rhodes

Tom Güldemann

Offers a linguistic window into contemporary hunter-gatherer societies, looking at how they survive and interface with agricultural and industrial societies.

The Language of Hunter-Gatherers

Piers Kelly

Sébastien Lacrampe

Australia is unique in the world for its diverse and interlocking systems of Indigenous social organisation. On no other continent do we see such an array of complex and contrasting social arrangements, coordinated through a principle of 'universal kinship' whereby two strangers meeting for the first time can recognise one another as kin. For some time, Australian kinship studies suffered from poor theorisation and insufficient aggregation of data. The large-scale AustKin project sought to redress these problems through the careful compilation of kinship information. Arising from the project, this book presents recent original research by a range of authors in the field on the kinship and social category systems in Australia. A number of the contributions focus on reconstructing how these systems originated and developed over time. Others are concerned with the relationship between kinship and land, the semantics of kin terms and the dynamics of kin interactions.

Patrick McConvell

About

Books

Join the club