Australian Journal of Linguistics

Vol. 12, no. 1 (1992)

Articles

Some problems in Kukatj phonology	Gavan Breen	1-43
Macassan loanwords in Top End languages	Nicholas Evans	45-91
Traditional Yankunytjatjara ways of speaking - A semantic perspective	Cliff Goddard	93-122
An Australian kinship affix *-rti	David Nash	123-144
The Sydney language notebooks and responses to language contact in early colonial NSW	Jakelin Troy	145-170
Linguistic research under Aboriginal control: A personal account of fieldwork in Central Australia	David Wilkins	171-200

Book reviews

Aboriginal legal issues (H. McCrae, G. Nettheim & L. Beacroft)	Diana Eades	201-208
Reversing language shift: Theoretical and empirical foundations of assistance to threatened languages (Joshua A. Fishman)	Patrick McConvell	209-220

Abstracts

Some problems in Kukatj phonology

Gavan Breen

Abstract: Kukatj is a language of north Queensland, Australia. Unusual (for Australia) phonetic features include a brief schwa-like vowel, very common and nearly always predictable, and gemination of consonants after a short stressed vowel. The phonological analysis is influenced by a handful of forms which block a number of simplifications. Its features: (1) three rhotics, two of which are marginal in that they contrast with the third (and with one another) only in a few environments; (2) a featureless underlying vowel, realised as a surface vowel (usually schwa) or sometimes as syllabicity in a consonant when required by phonotactic rules prohibiting certain consonant clusters but also - rarely - separating consonants which could have formed a permissible cluster; (3) phonemic vowel length (rather than phonemic consonant gemination); and (4) a minimal underlying word of two syllables (although surface monosyllables are extremely common). Phonetically retroflexed consonants (other than the glide) are analysed as apical tap plus apico-alveolar consonant. This has been proposed before for other Australian languages, but with little justification, and is relevant to theories of the history of retroflexes in Australia.

An Australian kinship affix *-rti

David Nash

Abstract: In various Australian languages there are one or two, sometimes more, kinship terms ending in -rti or -rtu. Comparative evidence is marshalled which bears on the historical question as to the ending's source. The most likely possibility, that the ending derives from a pronominal suffix denoting propositus (possessor), receives best support from its occurrence in the Gulf language Mara, which in turn raises questions about the prehistory of the relevant linguistic groups.

Last update: 3 May 2000
Comments to Tim Curnow