Worrorra

Worrorra
Author :
Publisher : University of Adelaide Press
Total Pages : 516
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781922064592
ISBN-13 : 1922064599
Rating : 4/5 (92 Downloads)

Synopsis Worrorra by : Mark Clendon

The Kimberley Arafuran language Worrorra was spoken traditionally on the remote coastline and precipitously beautiful hinterland between the Walcott Inlet and the Prince Regent River. The language described here is that attested by its last full speakers, Patsy Lulpunda, Amy Peters and Daisy Utemorrah. Patsy Lulpunda was a child when Europeans first entered her country in 1912, and Amy Peters and Daisy Utemorrah both grew up on the Kunmunya mission. This comprehensive and detailed grammar provides as well an historical and cultural context for a society now drastically altered. In the 1950s Worrorra people left their traditional land and from the 1970s the number of people speaking Worrorra as their first language declined dramatically. Worrorra is a highly polysynthetic language, characterised by overarching concord and a high degree of morphological fusion. Verbal semantics involve a voicing opposition and an extensive system of evidentiality-marking. Worrorra has elaborate systems of pragmatic reference, a derivational morphology that projects agreement-class concord across most lexical categories and complex predicates that incorporate one verb within another. Nouns are distributed among five genders, the intensional properties of which define dynamic oppositions between men and women on the one hand, and earth and sky on the other. This volume will be of interest to morphologists, syntacticians, semanticists, anthropologists, typologists, and readers interested in Australian language and culture generally.

Worrorran Revisited

Worrorran Revisited
Author :
Publisher : Pacific Linguistics Research School of Pacific and Asian Stu
Total Pages : 144
Release :
ISBN-10 : STANFORD:36105132779567
ISBN-13 :
Rating : 4/5 (67 Downloads)

Synopsis Worrorran Revisited by : William McGregor

The Languages of the Kimberley, Western Australia

The Languages of the Kimberley, Western Australia
Author :
Publisher : Routledge
Total Pages : 401
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781134396023
ISBN-13 : 1134396023
Rating : 4/5 (23 Downloads)

Synopsis The Languages of the Kimberley, Western Australia by : William B. McGregor

The Kimberley, the far north-west of Australia, is one of the most linguistically diverse regions of the continent. Some fifty-five Aboriginal languages belonging to five different families are spoken within its borders. Few of these languages are currently being passed on to children, most of whom speak Kriol (a new language that arose about half a century ago from an earlier Pidgin English) or Aboriginal English (a dialect of English) as their mother tongue and usual language of communication. This book describes the Aboriginal languages spoken today and in the recent past in this region.

Proto-Australian

Proto-Australian
Author :
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages : 506
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9783111421889
ISBN-13 : 3111421880
Rating : 4/5 (89 Downloads)

Synopsis Proto-Australian by : Mark Harvey

This book is the first full evaluation of the Proto-Australian hypothesis, which proposes that most Australian languages have a common ancestor: Proto-Australian [PA]. Using the standard methodologies of historical linguistics, the authors show that nearly all Australian languages descend from PA. Given that PA was a single language, it was spoken only in a small area of Australia. Its descendants have spread across the continent. Current theories of language spread do not offer clear motivations for large-scale spread in hunter-gatherer economies. This raises significant questions for analyses of Australian prehistory and archaeology specifically, and more widely for general theories of hunter-gatherer prehistory and language spread.

Keeping the Wanjinas Fresh

Keeping the Wanjinas Fresh
Author :
Publisher : Fremantle Press
Total Pages : 304
Release :
ISBN-10 : IND:30000100605439
ISBN-13 :
Rating : 4/5 (39 Downloads)

Synopsis Keeping the Wanjinas Fresh by : Valda Blundell

"Keeping the Wanjinas Fresh: Sam Woolagoodja and the Enduring Power of Lalai is the story of the people of the Wanjinas and their unbroken living cosmology of Lalai - the Dreaming - manifest most memorably in the dazzling giant Wanjina designed by Donny Woolagoodja for the opening ceremony of the Sydney Olympics." "It is also the story of Sam Woolagoodja, who was responsible for repainting the sacred Wanjinas in many of the rock shelters that dot the Kimberley landscape, and was among the first to paint the sacred stories on bark and board for Worrorra children living far from their homelands. Keeping the Wanjinas Fresh traces the journey that brought Donny to rekindling the tradition of freshening the Wanjinas. Thirty-two full colour plates feature Sam's and Donny's paintings and the work of other major Mowanjum artists."--BOOK JACKET.

Meeting the Waylo

Meeting the Waylo
Author :
Publisher : UWA Publishing
Total Pages : 326
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781760801144
ISBN-13 : 1760801143
Rating : 4/5 (44 Downloads)

Synopsis Meeting the Waylo by : Tiffany Shellam

This book explores the experiences of Indigenous Australians who participated in Australian exploration enterprises in the early nineteenth century. These Indigenous travellers, often referred to as ‘guide’s’, ‘native aides’, or ‘intermediaries’ have already been cast in a variety of ways by historians: earlier historiographies represented them as passive side-players in European heroic efforts of Discovery, while scholarship in the 1980s, led by Henry Reynolds, re-cast these individuals as ‘black pioneers’. Historians now acknowledge that Aborigines ‘provided information about the customs and languages of contiguous tribes, and acted as diplomats and couriers arranging in advance for the safe passage of European parties’. More recently, Indigenous scholars Keith Vincent Smith and Lynnette Russell describe such Aboriginal travellers as being entrepreneurial ‘agents of their own destiny’. While historiography has made up some ground in this area Aboriginal motivations in exploring parties, while difficult to discern, are often obscured or ignored under the title ‘guide’ or ‘intermediary’. Despite the different ways in which they have been cast, the mobility of these travellers, their motivations for travel and experience of it have not been thoroughly analysed. Some recent studies have begun to open up this narrative, revealing instead the ways in which colonisation enabled and encouraged entrepreneurial mobility, bringing about ‘new patterns of mobility for colonised peoples’.

Emplaced Myth

Emplaced Myth
Author :
Publisher : University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages : 300
Release :
ISBN-10 : 0824823893
ISBN-13 : 9780824823894
Rating : 4/5 (93 Downloads)

Synopsis Emplaced Myth by : Alan Rumsey

Australia and Papua New Guinea share a number of important social, cultural, and historical features, making a sustained comparison between the two especially productive. This situates the ethnography of the two areas within a comparative framework and examines the relationship between indigenous systems of knowledge and place - an issue of growing concern to anthropologists. The essays demonstrate the manner in which regimes of restricted knowledge serve to protect and augment cultural property and the proprietorship over sites and territory; how myths evolve to explain and culturally appropriate important events pertaining to contact between indigenous and Western societies; how graphic designs and other culturally important iconic and iconographic processes provide conduits of cross-cultural appropriation between indigenous and non-indigenous societies in today's multicultural nation states.

Morphology and Language History

Morphology and Language History
Author :
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages : 386
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9789027290960
ISBN-13 : 9027290962
Rating : 4/5 (60 Downloads)

Synopsis Morphology and Language History by : Claire Bowern

This volume aims to make a contribution to codifying the methods and practices linguists use to recover language history, focussing predominantly on historical morphology. The volume includes studies on a wide range of languages: not only Indo-European, but also Austronesian, Sinitic, Mon-Khmer, Basque, one Papuan language family, as well as a number of Australian families. Few collections are as cross-linguistic as this, reflecting the new challenges which have emerged from the study of languages outside those best known from historical linguistics. The contributors illustrate shared methodological and theoretical issues concerning genetic relatedness (that is, the use of morphological evidence for classification and subgrouping), reconstruction and processes of change with a diverse range of data. The volume is in honour of Harold Koch, who has long combined innovative research on understudied languages with methodological rigour and codification of practices within the discipline.

The Grammar of Inalienability

The Grammar of Inalienability
Author :
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages : 948
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9783110822137
ISBN-13 : 311082213X
Rating : 4/5 (37 Downloads)

Synopsis The Grammar of Inalienability by : Hilary Chappell

Research on language universals and research on linguistic typology are not antagonistic, but rather complementary approaches to the same fundamental problem: the relationship between the amazing diversity of languages and the profound unity of language. Only if the true extent of typological divergence is recognized can universal laws be formulated. In recent years it has become more and more evident that a broad range of languages of radically different types must be carefully analyzed before general theories are possible. Typological comparison of this kind is now at the centre of linguistic research. The series empirical approaches to language typology presents a platform for contributions of all kinds to this rapidly developing field. The distinctive feature of the series is its markedly empirical orientation. All conclusions to be reached are the result of a deepened study of empirical data. General problems are focused on from the perspective of individual languages, language families, language groups, or language samples. Special emphasis is given to the analysis of phenomena from little known languages, which shed new light on long-standing problems in general linguistics. The series is open to contributions from different theoretical persuasions. It thus reflects the methodological pluralism that characterizes the present situation. Care is taken that all volumes be accessible to every linguist and, moreover, to every reader specializing in some domain related to human language. A deeper understanding of human language in general, based on a detailed analysis of typological diversity among individual languages, is fundamental for many sciences, not only for linguists. Therefore, this series has proven to be indispensable in every research library, be it public or private, which has a specialization in language and the language sciences. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Birgit Sievert.

A Companion to Rock Art

A Companion to Rock Art
Author :
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages : 692
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781118253922
ISBN-13 : 1118253922
Rating : 4/5 (22 Downloads)

Synopsis A Companion to Rock Art by : Jo McDonald

This unique guide provides an artistic and archaeological journey deep into human history, exploring the petroglyphic and pictographic forms of rock art produced by the earliest humans to contemporary peoples around the world. Summarizes the diversity of views on ancient rock art from leading international scholars Includes new discoveries and research, illustrated with over 160 images (including 30 color plates) from major rock art sites around the world Examines key work of noted authorities (e.g. Lewis-Williams, Conkey, Whitley and Clottes), and outlines new directions for rock art research Is broadly international in scope, identifying rock art from North and South America, Australia, the Pacific, Africa, India, Siberia and Europe Represents new approaches in the archaeological study of rock art, exploring issues that include gender, shamanism, landscape, identity, indigeneity, heritage and tourism, as well as technological and methodological advances in rock art analyses