A grammar of Limilngan:
A language of the Mary River Region, Northern Territory, Australia
Harvey, Mark
PL 516
This grammar provides a description
of Limilngan, a previously undescribed and now extinct language
of northern Australia. Australian languages generally show
a high degree of structural similarity to one another. Limilngan
shows some of the common Australian patterns, but in other
areas it diverges significantly from them. It has a standard
Australian phonological inventory, bit its phonotactic patterns
are unusual. Some heterorganic clusters such as /kb/ are of
markedly higher frequency than homorganic clusters such as
/nd/. Like a number of Australian languages, Limilngan has
many vowel-initial morphemes. However, historically these
result from lenition and not from initial dropping as elsewhere
in Australia. Like many northern languages, it has complex
systems of both prefixation and suffixation to nominals and
verbs. Prefixation provides information about nominal classification
(four classes), mood, and pronominal cross-reference (subject
and objects). Suffixation provides information about case,
tense and aspect. Limilngan differs from most Australian languages
in that a considerable amount of its morphology is unproductive,
showing complex and irregular allomorphic variation. Limilngan
is like most Australian languages in that it may be described
as a free word order language. However, word order is not
totally free and strictly ordered phrasal compounding structures
are significant (e.g. in the formation of denominal verbs).
2001 ISBN 0 85883 461 8
xii + 209 pp.
Prices: Australia AUD$49.50
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