As part of what appears to be a continuing campaign to denigrate Australian languages (thereby demonstrating the supposed lack of intellect of their speakers) it has been pointed out that ‘logical connectors’ – ‘or’, ‘because’, ‘if, and so on – are frequently lacking. Love [1938: 119] remarked of Worora, ‘Alternative propositions do not occur. The Worora man does not say, Shall I do this or that? He says, Shall I do this? No. I shall do that. If asked in English, Will you have this or that? he will invariably reply, Yes, desiring both.’

Dyirbal does not have any particles exactly corresponding to English ‘or’, ‘if’ or ‘because’ (any more than English has words corresponding to Dyirbal mugu, biri or wara). The language is, however, quite as capable as English of expressing conditions, alternatives and implications. Amongst the syntactic means employed are:

ENTAILMENT

The major construction here is that involving an implicated VC, in purposive construction – examples were given in 4.4.3, 5.3.3–4. An implicated VC refers to an action (action) that is the ‘consequence’ of the action (action) referred to by the preceding NP. There are two possibilities: (a) action was done deliberately, just so that action should be possible – e.g. run to a tree to climb it, hit someone to kill them; (b) action is the unavoidable (but unplanned) consequence of actio – e.g. perso goes to a place and as a result encounters person who (unknown to person had settled at the place (see text xxv, line 40, p. 391).