Nominal Root Reduplication

(1) We can» regard nominal root reduplication as a partially productive morphological process in cases where (a) the reduplicated root is

capable of standing alone as an independent word, and (b) the

reduplicated form has a meaning clearly related to the reduplicated root. Semantically significant reduplication of this type is found with both noun and adjective roots, but I have not established the precise bounds of its productiveness.

With adjective roots, the semantic effect of reduplication is to weaken 20

or ’deintensify’ the meaning of the root eg pulka ’big’, pulkapulka ’biggish’; pika ’angry’, pikapika ’irritated, annoyed’; tartja ’shallow’, tartjatartja ’rather shallow’; puriny ’slowly, gently’, purinypuriny

’very softly’; rawa 'for a long time, persistentlyrawarawa 'for rather a long time, rather persistently’; wanma ’far away'wanmawanma ’somewhat

far aw a y ’; kura 'bad, useless, harmful', kurakura 'pretty useless, not

very harmful'. (Moravcsik 1978:322 notes that in many languages

"diminution and attentuation . . . are senses conveyed by reduplication".)

4-151 piriya puriny-puriny wangka-nytja-la-mpa,

spring wind(NOM) softly-softly(NOM) talk-NOML-LOC-INTEREST

kuka-ku-lta.. meat-PURP-AND THEN

'When the spring wind starts to blow gently, (the men) start going for meat'

4-152 wanma-wanma tju-ra

far away-far away put-IMP

'Put it a little way away!' (smoking stick in fire)

With noun roots,the semantic effect of reduplication is usually to describe something as similar to the referent of the root, usually

through being a reduced or weakened version of it. For instance,

kulpi 'cave', kulpikulpi 'a sort of cave, a small cave'; ngura 'camp', ngurangura 'a sort of camp, a temporary camp'; purtju 'rash, scabies', purtjupurtju 'itch'; mukul 'hook on spear or spear-thrower', mukulmukul

'a sort of hook'.

4-153 palu ili nyara paluru apu

BUT OF COURSE wild-fig over there DEF(NOM) rock

kulpi-kulpi-ngka unngu ngara-nyi

cave-cave-LOC inside stand-PRES

'Only of course the wild fig was growing a small cave in the hills'

4-154 maku ila-ra ngalku-payi, mukulmukul-ta,

grub(ACC) pull-SERIAL eat-CHAR hook-hook-LOC

punu tjukutjuku-ngka, tartja-tjara

stick little-LOC off-shoot-HAVING

'(You) pull out the grubs and eat them with/off a sort of

A similar semantic effect is found with reduplication of certain temporal expressions (8,4) eg munga ’darkness, night '. mungamunga 'very early morning, half-light’; kalala 'no o n ' kalalakalala 'mid­

afternoon, late morning'; mungartji 'late afternoon', mungartjimungartji 'mid-afternoon', A rather specialised use of reduplicated noun roots is in describing children's 'pretend' games. For instance,playing 'women' is kungkakungka inkanyi woman-woman play-PRES; playing at hunting

kangaroos is malumalu inkanyi; to play 'motorcars' is mutakamutaka

inkanyi» (Moravcsik 1978:323 notes comparable examples in several languages, pointing out that "the meaning 'similar to X' appears to be close to the meaning of attenuation; and the meaning 'pretend to X' is again close to

'similar to X ' .")

There are a few other instances of noun reduplication; kutjupa 'another, different' reduplicates as kutj upakutj upa 'various different things'; the stems mara 'hand' and mutu 'knee' reduplicated describe a person's mode of moving, as crawling or 'walking' on the knees respectively -

ie maramara/mutimuti yananyi 'going hand-hand/knee-knee'.

(2) Roots capable of standing alone are found reduplicated in many stems denoting plants, but it is uncertain or unlikely

that there is any synchronic semantic connection between the root and the stem. It is helpful to think of a cline or range of potential semantic relatedness. At one extreme there are words like ipiipi

'snake vine' and katjikatji, as in (4-155), where there is some evident or plausible relation between the appearance of the plant and the mean­ ing of the root. At the other end are partjatapartjata 'quoll-quoll' and pakalipakali 'g r a n d s o n - g r a n d s o n w h e r e there is no evident connection.

(Speakers differed in their responses to my questions about semantic relatedness. All found the idea of a connection in examples like (4-156) quite amusing.)

4-155 (i) ipi-ipi milk-milk

'snake vine,Sarcostemma australe' (exudes a milky sap when broken) (ii) katji-katji

spear-spear

(this plant has tall woody shafts used by boys as play spears)

(iii) parka-parka

thin leaf-thin leaf

'Lysianna spp' (a mistletoe with thin leaves)

4-156 (i) partjata-partjata 'grass sp, Monachaetor paradoxa' quoll-quoll

(ii) pakali-pakali 'Canthium lineare' grandson-grandson

(3) A third type of reduplicated stem takes in the many lexemes where the reduplicated element does not occur independently at all. These include (i) bird names - natural since the name is usually based on a conventionalised rendering of the bird's call eg nyiinyii 'zebra finch', mininymininy 'yellow-rumped thornbill', tiiltiil 'magpie lark',

piilpiil 'yellow-throated mincer' (ii) the names for some insects eg pintapinta 'brightly coloured butterflies', muumuu 'bee1, kurtjikurtji

a type of water insect , papapapa a type of ant (iii) many words for things, especially natural phenomena, which are 'multiple' and

'distributed' eg kulyarkulyar 'heavy dew', tjulpuntjulpun 'wild flowers', putaputa 'sedge', minyaminya 'bits and pieces, tiny pieces' (iv) some revolving things kutikuti 'rolling', kupikupi P. 'whirlwind' (v) words for some undesirable mental or psychological conditions eg kawakawa/ yukuyuku/wapawapa 'crazy, nutty' kananykanany 'proud', ramarama 'confused, out of touch', pilupilu 'drowsy', tunguntungun 'stubborn, unyielding'.

(vi) Other words eg utiuti a sort of sponge made by grinding a certain type of grass, pukupuku referring to ground moistened and cleared of tracks by rain, irmangkairmangka 'mint bush, Prostanthera striatiflora', manimani 'native fucshia, Eremophila paisleyi'.

CHAPTER FIVE : NOMINALISATION, RELATIVISMION AND SUBORDINATION 5.1 NOMINALISATION

5.1.1 Preliminary Remarks

I use the term 'nominalisation' with a systematic ambiguity to mean both a process which converts a verb or a clause into a noun or noun phrase, and the resulting noun or noun phrase itself.’*' There are two productive processes of nominalisation in Yankunytjatjara, correspond­ ing to the types called by Comrie and Thompson (to appear) 'action/state nominalisation' and 'agentive/instrumental nominalisation' (which I prefer to call 'characteristic' for reasons given in 5.1.3).

Nominalisation plays a central role in Yankunytjatjara syntax, since it is through nominalisation that syntactic subordination takes place. Subordinate clauses always decompose into a nominalised clause followed by case inflections or relator suffixes. For instance, circumstantial clauses are action nominalisations followed by the locative case marker, intentive clauses are action nominalisationssuffixed with the INTENTive relator -kitj a , and aversive clauses are characteristic nominalisations followed by the locative case marker. Nominalisation also plays a role in one type of relative clause (5.2.1), though an alternative strategy involving a finite verb is also possible.

A Yankunytjatjara verb belongs to one of four conjugational classes. Except for the 0-class, verbs have three distinct stem forms to which various inflectional and derivational suffixes are added (6.1.2.) - the p ^ f e c t i v e (root) stem, the imperfective stem, and the neutral stem.

Nominalising suffixes apply to the neutral stem - action/state nominaliser NOML has (underlying) form -nytj a and the characteristic nominaliser has

form -payi. This is illustrated below with sample lexemes from the four verb classes.

Morphemic Analysis of Nominalised Verbs

VERB CLASS SIMPLE STEM NEUTRAL STEM -nytja NOML -payi CHAR

0 wangka- 'talk' wangka-nytja wangka-payi

n tju- 'put' tju-nku- tjunku-nytja tjunku-payi

ng pu- 'hit' pu-ngku- pungku-nytj a pungku-payi

1 kuli- 'he a r ' kuli-1- *kulil-nytja — > kuli-ntj a

As discussed in 6.1.1 a morphophonemic change occurs when the -nytja suffix is added to an 1-class stem: 1 + nytja(a) — -> fltja(a) . Note that *lnytja would not be a permissable sequence of consonants - both because three consonants cannot occur in a row, and because *lny- is not a permissable sequence. The proposed change circumvents both these prohibitions. The 1 + ny merge with the resulting phoneme n_ having dental place of articulation but retaining nasal manner of articulation.

5.1.2 Action/State Nominalisation -nytj a NOML

Comrie and Thompson (to appear) would describe -nytj a NOML as an "action/ state nominalisation..(a device)..for creating action nouns from action verbs, and Stative nouns from Stative verbs..meaning the fact, the act,

the quality or occurrence of that verb.." Nominalisation with -nytj a is completely productive and completely regular, ie there is a

nominalised form for every verb in Yankunytjatjara, and all are constructed according to the rules just outlined. This form of the verb is the

natural citation form.

As Comrie and Thompson point out, languages often have nominalisation processes that produce noun-phrases "which contain, in addition toSr^ derived from a verb, one or more reflexes of a proposition or a

predicate", and some of their main generalisations concern the internal syntax of such expressions. On the one hand the reflexes (arguments) of the nominalised verb may be related to it syntactically in ways characteristic of the structure of non-derived noun-phrases, as in English where "subjects and objects assimilate to NP syntax" eg in 'the enemyT s destruction of the city' the reflexes of the subject and object are associated with the nominalised verb destruction by the genitive morphology. "At the opposite extreme from English...we find languages like Tamil (a Dravidian language) and Avar (a North Caucasian language) where the internal syntax of the action nominal noun-phrase, as far as

subject and direct object are concerned is like that of a sentence and different from that in a noun-phrase." This is also true of

Yankunytjatjara - in nominalisations formed with -nytja NOML, the arguments precede the verb with the usual case-marking.

Aside from their uses in subordinate constructions (5.2 - 5.5), action nominalisations may function as arguments of finite verbs, most commonly in the ’accusative topic of speech' construction as in (5-1) and (5-2),

where the nominalisation specifies the content or subject matter of a speech-act or story.

5-1 paluru ilu-nytja watja-ni DEF(ERG) die-NOML(ACC) say-PRES

'He's talking about dying'

In Text 1, lines 13-21,a series of nominalisations occur as Kanytji lists the type of things that he and others should use to teach me the language. They should keep away from sacred information, and stick to ordinary

stories of every day life.

5-2 tjukur kura-kura panya, yanku-nytja yanku-nytja story bad-bad(ACC) ANAPH go-NOML go-NOML murka, maa-yanku-la punu katantanku-nytja, lots(ACC) away-go-SERIAL wood(ACC) break off-NOML(ACC) ngalya-kulpa-nytja, palu-nya tjana-nya

this way-return-NOML(ACC) DEF-ACC 3pl-ACC

'You know, ordinary stories, (about) all different comings and goings, going and getting wood, coming back, those

(types of) things'

An action nominalisation may also be used (i) to refer to the tracks or traces left on the ground by an action (5-3) (ii) to refer to some­ thing which has been the object of an action (5-4) (5-5) (see also (6-59)) (iii) to describe something as the product of an intransitive verb, (5-6) and (5-7).

5-3 kaa paluru tjukaruru-ngku wana-nma, kuka CONTR DEF(ERG) straight-ERG follow-IMP.IMPF meat(ACC) kati-nytja wana-nma, kutjupa-kutjupa

take-NOML(ACC) follow-IMP.IMPF different-different(ACC) itarikati-nytja

drag-NOML(ACC)

'And straight-way she would follow (where the animal) had taken it's game, (where it) dragged something or other

5-4 paluru-lta ngalku-ni kutju-ngku ngalku-nytja

DEF(ERG)-AND THEN eat-PRES alone-ERG eat-NOML

wiya, kunta-ringa-nyi, waputju-ngku yungku-nytja

NEG shame-INCHO-PRES father-in-law-ERG give-NOML(NOM)

'He eats then, he doesn't eat alone. He's ashamed, (it’s

a)gift (given thing) from his father-in-law'

5-5 ...uti-uti, wangunu purara-ngka

grass sponge woollybutt seed(ACC) honey-ant-LOC

kaputunku-nytja, palu-nya pula-nya

make into a ball-NOML(ACC) DEF-ACC 3du-ACC

maa-tjunku-la wanti-payi

away-put-SERIAL leave alone-CHAR

'The grass sponge, (and) the woollybutt flour made into a ball with honey-ant honey, (you) put the two of them away' (to be kept for one's son)

5-6 paluru ninti pulka, pulka-ra ninti-ringku-nytja

DEF(NOM) knowing big(NOM) do fully-SERIAL knowing-INCHO-NOML

'He's really knowledgable, (someone) who has learnt really well'

5-7 nyanga kayariny, kampa-ra pilti-ringku-nytja,

this dried plant(NOM) burn-SERIAL dry-INCHO-NOML(NOM)

ngara-nyi stand-PRES

'Here's a dried out plant (kayariny), something that has been burnt and dried out'

In document A semantically-oriented grammar of the Yankunytjatjara dialect of the Western Desert language (Page 163-170)