Abstract
In the Victoria River District (VRD) of the Northern Territory, the citation and neutral form of many placenames is marked with the locative case, both in the Pama-Nyungan (PN) languages (Eastern Ngumpin) and in the non-Pama-Nyungan (NPN) languages (of the Jarragan, Mindi and Yangmanic2 families). In the central area of the district both the PN languages (Ngarinyman, Birlinarra, Gurindji) and the NPN languages (Jaminjung, Ngaliwurru, Nungali) there is often an additional element added to the locative, which in the modern languages has a variety of functions including ‘exactly’ (for discussion of semantics of such suffixes, McConvell 1983; Schultze-Berndt 2002). The actual form of the elements is unrelated in the different families but the patterning is highly similar. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how these patterns – LOCATIVE and LOCATIVE+EXACTLY – came to be distributed across language families linguo-genetically and typologically distant from each other. If there was structural diffusion what was the source and how did it occur?
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Aboriginal Placenames: Naming and Re-naming the Australian Landscape |
| Editors | Harold Koch, Luise Hercus |
| Place of Publication | Canberra, A.C.T. |
| Publisher | Australian National University E Press |
| Pages | 359-402 |
| Number of pages | 44 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 9781921666094 |
| ISBN (Print) | 9781921666087 |
| Publication status | Published - 2009 |
Keywords
- Pama-Nyungan languages
- grammar, comparative and general
- locative constructions
- Australia