[Notes]
1 The English translation of this poem is by Alistair Reid. 2 The Aboriginal people I refer to typically have a “whitefeller name” and a traditional name, e.g. Pat Gabori and Kabararrjingathi bulthuku. Traditional names often have a strong element of privacy, sometimes even comparable to a pin number on a bank account, and are used sparingly if at all, so in general I will use their whitefeller names in this text. 3 Pinker and Bloom (1990:715). 4 And if we take more complicated sentences as examples, we see that other nouns (basically all nouns except the subject) also get the tense-marking. “He speared the turtle with big brother’s spear” is niya raajarra bangana thabujukarrangunina wumburungunina: thabujukarra means “big brother’s,” wumburung“spear,” -karra “belonging to,” and -nguni “with, using.” As you can see, “turtle,” “big brother’s,” and “spear” all get the past tense suffix -na. The instrumental suffix -nguni also ends up on all words in the noun phrase “big brother’s spear.” This penchant for agreement is another highly unusual characteristic of Kayardild, which I do not go into here: it can lead to nouns stacking up four case suffixes at a stretch, to a level of complexity not found in any other human language – see Evans (1995a, 1995b, 2003b, 2006). 5 It turns out, in fact, that quite a number of languages mark tense on nouns – see Nordlinger and Sadler (2004) for a comprehensive survey and discussion. 6 For the moment I simply assert this figure, but we return to the grounds it is based on in chapter 10.
- DOI
- 10.1086/250327
- Volume
- 4 (1)
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- 85-86
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- en
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