Search: Start Page ➙ Language: Tiwi (tiw) Family/Group  Australian, Tiwian Area  Australia and New Guinea General Data  spoken on Bathurst and Melville Islands (Australia) Typological Information  • SVO • agglutinative • polysynthetic • noun incorporating • 2 genders, the suffixes of which (masculine Ni and feminine Ka) have unpredictable morphologically conditioned variants (cf. Osborne 1974: 52) • predominantly prefixing • adjectives only differ from nouns syntactically in their ability to function as modifier of a noun or verb (cf. Osborne 1974: 58) Reduplication Form-Function  • Ca-: pluralization (with affixation) Osborne (1974: 53) does not specify the irregularities in the form of many of the reduplicating plurals in his data (the following examples seeming to be of the kind which do not fit into his general description of plural reduplication: ŋi iŋkalipini/ŋi iŋkalipa "my half brother/my half sister" -> ŋia kaŋkəɹalipi "my half siblings"; alijiŋa "young girl" -> alaliŋiuwi "young girls"; awurini "man" -> wawuruwi "men") Relationship Form-Function  one form - one function Productivity  reduplication for forming plurals is restricted to a small number of nominals (cf. Osborne 1974: 52) Forms  Select Valuereduplicant with fixed segments   Functions  Select Valuelexical enrichment pluralization Patterns  Select Valuepartial partial with affixation Semantics  Select Valueplurality   Word Classes  Select Value0 — other other — other   All Examples  ⊞ References    Terminology    Glossary    Field Descriptions

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