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)
Terminology