Abstract
Abstract
This chapter presents an introduction to Wajarri, a Pama-Nyungan language from the Murchison-Gascoyne region of Western Australia. Wajarri is a typical Western Australian Pama-Nyungan language, having a fairly free word order and a suffixing, agglutinative structure. It has a split-ergative case marking system and an incomplete set of bound pronouns which encliticise to the first clausal constituent. Wajarri has two open verb conjugation classes and a small set of irregular verbs, which inflect for tense, aspect and mood. Additionally it shows a switch-reference system that applies to certain subordinate clause types. The phonemic inventory has six places of articulation for consonants, with both a laminal and apical contrast, and three vowels. Wajarri traditional country extends across a large area and has a number of named varieties, which vary primarily in lexicon.
Publisher
Oxford University PressOxford
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