Verbs as Spatial Deixis markers in Jingulu

Contrary to the common pattern of spatial terms being metaphorically extended to location in time, the Australian language Jingulu shows an unusual extension of temporal markers to indicate location in space. Light verbs, which typically encode tense, aspect, mood and associated motion, are occasionally found on nouns to indicate the relative location of the referent with respect to the speaker. It is hypothesised that this pattern resulted from the reduction of verbal clauses used as relative modifiers to the nouns in question

Verbs as Spatial Deixis Markers in Jingulu

In Jingulu discourse and narrative, nominals sometimes bear suffixes which are identical to light verbs. As discussed in section 1, light verbs are bound morphemes which form the syntactic core of verbal predicate words, and typically encode tense, aspect, mood, and associated motion. The appearance of these morphemes on nominals is discussed in section 2, where it is shown that, in the nominal context, these morphemes do not reflect any verbal/inflectional properties of the clause, but rather serve as markers of definiteness or deixis. In this function, the morphemes are best translated by phrases such as 'here, up ahead, back there' and so forth. Possible origins of this phenomenon are entertained in section 3, with the hypothesis advanced that it may have arisen from the reduction of subordinate clauses. A question remains as to whether these 'tense-marked nominals' should be analysed synchronically as clauses or noun phrases. Section 4 searches for similar phenomena in other languages, examining tense marking occurring on nominals independently of clausal tense. While such phenomena are found in other languages, these typically mark temporal rather than spatial deixis

Part Of Speech Mismatches in Modular Grammar: New Evidence from Jingulu

The Jingulu language of central-northern Australia presents some difficulties in terms of classifying certain of its lexemes into part of speech categories. Personal names, for instance, which should be nouns on notional grounds, have the phonological and morphosyntactic properties of interjections, whilst notionally verbal roots are distinctly non-verbal in their distribution. These phenomena are analysed according to the principles of autolexical syntax, wherein different levels of representation of the same linguistic item (morphem, word, phrase and so forth) need not necessarily correspond to one another exactly

Eulogizing a language: The Ngarnka experience

In 1996, I worked with what appear to have been the last fluent speakers of Ngarnka, a language of central northern Australia. To the best of my knowledge, the last fluent speaker passed away in 1997 or 1998. In 2000, I began to collect all available information on the language. This article describes some of the challenges that have arisen in working with a language during and after the final stages of its death, and examines some of the possible reasons for, and impact of, this kind of work

Vowel Harmony in Jingulu

Jingulu, a language of North-Central Australia, exhibits a pattern of regressive vowel harmony which is not only difficult to characterise accurately in descriptive terms, but also poses challenges for current theories of vowel harmony. The purpose of this article is thus threefold: to describe a fascinating phonological phenomenon, to formulate accurate generalisations which capture the phenomenon, and to bring the phenomenon within the range of current theories. I argue that the phenomenon cannot be understood in purely phonological terms, but must also take morphosyntactic properties of the language into account

Towards a Typology of Configurationality

This article examines a variety of languages which have been called 'nonconfigurational', and introduces new material from the Australian language Jingulu, to show that there is a wider variety of types of nonconfigurationality than has been assumed in previous analyses within the Principles and Parameters framework. It is argued that Baker's (1996a, b) approaches are essentially correct in their analysis of 'how' various nonconfigurational languages establish relationships between overt elements, but that they fail to capture the 'why' of nonconfigurationality. This source, it is argued, is a restriction on what positions in the clause are able to host encyclopedic information (as opposed to formal features, which are always permitted in core predicate and argument positions). These restrictions drive a language to employ various of the mechanisms proposed by Baker in his work. This analysis is then extended to a variety of language types. Finally, a continuum of (non)configurational types is established among some Australian languages

Case Suffixes as Discourse Markers in Jingulu

Jingulu exhibits a pattern of Focus marking quite different to anything found in adjacent or closely related languages. The Ergative, and to a lesser extent the Dative, case suffixes havecome to be used as optional indicators of contrastive focus in addition to their original case-marking uses. Some other headmarking non-Pama-Nyungan languages (such as Jaminjungan, distantly related to Jingulu, Rembarrnga, and Gooniyandi) also use case markers to indicate discourse functions, but the Jingulu system differs from these in two important respects: the Jingulu innovation appears to be extremely recent (30-40 years) and the Jingulu system uses all core case markers, not just one particular marker, for this function. One possible explanation for this innovation in Jingulu involves re-analysis of the case markers resulting from the dominant and increasing influence of the English language on the final generations of Jingulu speakers