Pama Nyungan Languages

Background:
This document was hand written sometime in the first two decades of the twentieth century based on the recollections of the mid nineteenth century childhood and adult experiences (living among and around the Warndandi for most of his later adult life) of my great grandmother's uncle Alfred ‘Jack’ Bussell. I grew up with my grandmothers stories about this document, and in the 2000s found copies of it both in a collection in  the Battye Library in Perth Western Australian, and in the possession of an extended family member of Bussell decent.
Jack grew up with his siblings at the traditional Wardandi-Bibbulmin campsite of Meekadarrabee in a dwelling co-constructed by his parents, Alfred (Noongar name: Mundle) and Ellen Bussell, and the local Wardandi community, at a location known as Ellensbrook to Europeans.  The Wardandi very generously shared the location and co-habitation of the Meekadarrabee campsite and it's rare fresh water spring with the teenage newlyweds Alfred and Ellen, with whom they had a strong positive relationship.
For most of Jack and his siblings’ childhoods they lived at Ellensbrook/Meekadarrabee with no day to day contact with other European children, growing up and playing with wardandi coolarng (children).  The only European presence in their daily lives outside of the immediate family were the tutors employed by Alfred and Ellen to educate their children, an education offered to any Noongar children that had the inclination to learn spoken English, reading and writing. The two best known Wardandi-Bibbulmin children to make use of this opportunity were Sam Isaacs and Ngilgi.

Authorisation and Permission:
The transmission of Wardandi Bibbulmin culture in this document and the cultural accuracy of the contents therein has explicitly authorised by my cousin and Wardandi elder Bill Borung Walger Webb. Jack was never an initiated male, and Bill has confirmed there is no privileged knowledge or culture within this document.

This document includes:
* Traditional Wardandi Bibbulmin Noongar name lists
* Traditional Wardandi-Bibbulmin Noongar language grammatical guide.
* Guide to the placement of the tongue to pronounce Wardandi-Bibbulmin Noongar language correctly.
* Accounts of the geographic extent of Noongar family ties and travel.
* Descriptions of the traditional Wardandi-Bibbulmin Noongar distinction between oral history stories and creation/dreaming stories, including a historical Pama-Nyungan language origin story.
* Jack’s perspective of traditional Wardandi-Bibbulmin Noongar life prior to widespread European occupation of the Wardandi-Bibbulmin territory.

I have transcribed this document from records and family documents and created this revision edited for grammar, spelling, intended meaning where clear, consistent phonetic spelling of Noongar words, and consistent section headings & structure in an attempt to make it’s contents as accessible as possible to the contemporary Noongar community.  Todd Griffiths

This book is a comprehensive linguistic description of Ngardi, a Pama-Nyungan language of Australia. Ngardi is a member of the Ngumpin-Yapa subgroup, traditionally spoken in Western Australia on the fringes of the Tanami and Great Sandy deserts. Today, this language is currently spoken by less than twenty individuals. This work primarily draws on narrative and elicitation materials compiled by Lee Cataldi in the 1990s as well as more recent recordings by the author between 2016-2020.The grammatical analysis strikes a balance between being informed by descriptions of closely related languages, linguistic typology as well as providing clear and data-focused descriptions of linguistic phenomena.

The Kuuk Thaayorre lexicon of kinship can be divided into four subsystems, each of which is hyponymically related to the others. At the finest level of granularity, the set of referential terms (e.g. kanam ‘[someone’s] elder brother’) distinguishes thirty-four classes of kin. These are hyponyms of the twenty-one vocative terms (e.g. waanhn! ‘big brother!’, which may also be used to address a male speaker’s son’s son or any speaker’s brother’s son’s son). The vocative forms are in turn hyponyms of the sixteen bereavement terms (e.g. piluump, which may be used to refer to someone bereaved of an elder brother, or elder sister, brother’s son’s daughter, brother’s son’s son and so on), while the seven kinship hand signs – which are hypernyms of the bereavement terms – are the most semantically broad of the system. In this manual register, an elder brother is indicated by a point to the shin, as is any sibling, grandchild or grandparent of the same patriline as ego. The respective semantic ranges of the hand signs can be precisely delimited in terms of three features (patriline, matriline and generational harmony), organizing principles which would otherwise be invisible. The purpose of this chapter is twofold: (a) to explore the covert categories that are revealed by a semantic analysis of the four subsystems and the relationships between them; and (b) to outline the structure of kinship in Kuuk Thaayorre.

An extensive body of literature now exists regarding the phonological process of lenition. Despite receiving different treatments in numerous theoretical frameworks, lenition is commonly assumed to be a phonetically-driven process (Donegan & Stampe, 1979). It is therefore somewhat surprising that many works on lenition have not always paid much attention to phonetic studies. Similarly, typologies of Australian sound systems have much to benefit from more careful examination of the full range of possible phonetic variation. An overlapping area of interest is phonetic stop variation in Australian languages, as it concerns both theories of lenition and typologies of Australian obstruent systems.

The present study makes two contributions. It describes a greater range of phonetic variation in one Australian obstruent inventory, and it serves to expand the range of phonetic data that theories of lenition need account for. The focus of the thesis is an investigation of phonetic realisations of phonemic stops in Gurindji (Ngumpin-Yapa, Pama-Nyungan). In Australian languages, stop phonemes are reported to commonly lenite to fricative and approximant allophones in intervocalic positions (Dixon, 2002), however, the question remains whether this is the full extent of variation. I investigate the realisations of intervocalic stops in word medial and initial positions as well as post-nasal stops. I present intensity and spectrographic evidence for a range of obstruent types that are neither fully closed (true stops) nor identifiable as familiar allophonic variants (fricatives and approximants). I propose the terms ‘quasi stops’, ‘sonorous strictures’ and ‘weak fricatives’ to categorise the variation found intervocalically. Post-nasally, stops are found to be reduced and even elided, a phenomenon unreported in the lenition literature, but present in some Australian languages.

I argue that the variation found in Gurindji stops is clearly leniting in behaviour, and this has ramifications for theoretical debates regarding lenition. In terms of current theory, intervocalic lenition, as found in Gurindji, is unremarkable. However, word initial lenition, while not unusual in Australian languages, is unaccounted for by current theories (Kingston, 2008; Kirchner, 1998). In contrast, post-nasal lenition is theoretically expected (Kingston, 2008) but rarely attested. This study brings new data and insight to these topical areas of the
literature.

An extensive body of literature now exists regarding the phonological process of lenition. Despite receiving different treatments in numerous theoretical frameworks, lenition is commonly assumed to be a phonetically-driven process (Donegan & Stampe, 1979). It is
therefore somewhat surprising that many works on lenition have not always paid much attention to phonetic studies. Similarly, typologies of Australian sound systems have much to benefit from more careful examination of the full range of possible phonetic variation. An
overlapping area of interest is phonetic stop variation in Australian languages, as it concerns both theories of lenition and typologies of Australian obstruent systems.
The present study makes two contributions. It describes a greater range of phonetic variation in one Australian obstruent inventory, and it serves to expand the range of phonetic data that theories of lenition need account for. The focus of the thesis is an investigation of phonetic
realisations of phonemic stops in Gurindji (Ngumpin-Yapa, Pama-Nyungan). In Australian languages, stop phonemes are reported to commonly lenite to fricative and approximant allophones in intervocalic positions (Dixon, 2002), however, the question remains whether
this is the full extent of variation. I investigate the realisations of intervocalic stops in word medial and initial positions as well as post-nasal stops. I present intensity and spectrographic evidence for a range of obstruent types that are neither fully closed (true stops) nor
identifiable as familiar allophonic variants (fricatives and approximants). I propose the terms ‘quasi stops’, ‘sonorous strictures’ and ‘weak fricatives’ to categorise the variation found intervocalically. Post-nasally, stops are found to be reduced and even elided, a phenomenon
unreported in the lenition literature, but present in some Australian languages.
I argue that the variation found in Gurindji stops is clearly leniting in behaviour, and this has ramifications for theoretical debates regarding lenition. In terms of current theory, intervocalic lenition, as found in Gurindji, is unremarkable. However, word initial lenition,
while not unusual in Australian languages, is unaccounted for by current theories (Kingston, 2008; Kirchner, 1998). In contrast, post-nasal lenition is theoretically expected (Kingston, 2008) but rarely attested. This study brings new data and insight to these topical areas of the
literature.

Guest talk given at the University of Copenhagen 26 March, 2015.
I render the notion and typological validity of the so called Second-Position Phenomena, i.e. principles of linearization sensitive to the distance from the clausal (or phrasal) left edge rather than to the type of the preceding syntactic category.
The most famous syntactic constraint of this type is Wackernagel’s law (CL2) , a principle predicting clausal-second position of clustering clitics, i.e. weak stressed elements forming clusters. In my talk, I’ll propose a classification of word order systems with clustering clause-level clitics attested in genetically not related worlds language’s, including Slavic languages from the Indo-European family, and discuss the triggers and parameters of clitic-external ordering and clitic-internal ordering.
Another well-known syntactic constraint is the Verb-Second constraint (V2), in its canonic form attested in Germanic languages (except for Gothic, English, Old English and Elder Futhark) and Kashmiri. The interest to V2 languages has been revoked by the revival of the so called sentence cartography, which is a universalist version of the Template analysis proposed in 1930-1950s by the structuralists from the Prague and Copenhagen Linguistic Circles (Da. : sætningsskemaet). I argue against broad definitions of V2 and deny the existence of the so called  ‘partial V2 languages’, ‘residual V2 languages’ etc., where structures overtly resembling V2 are attested only in one part of declarative clauses.
I claim that neither CL2 nor V2 are principles of Universal Grammar. They are ‘shallow’ constraints of narrow syntax, specific for classes of world’s languages. I’ll discuss syntactic, prosodic and information structure mechanisms, which trigger second-position phenomena, in particular, the so called verb movement and constraints on the cooccurrence of syntactic categories (Comp vs V, Comp  vs CL, V vs CL, Comp vs Wh-words etc).

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