Adverbs in Worrorra modify predicates at nuclear, core and peripheral levels. Nuclear- and peripheral-level adverbs are discussed in §10.1, while core-level or modal adverbs are discussed in §10.2. In addition, §10.3 looks at some demonstrative adverbs used to locate events in space, §10.4 at some adverbs used to locate events at specific times, and §10.5 at a couple of interrogative adverbs. §10.6 will survey a number of very frequently encountered suffixes and postpositions attached to nouns, that form phrases or phrasal words functioning as de-nominal adverbs.

A number of important adverbs are enclitic on preceding material. A small number of aspectual morphemes are encliticized to preverbs, with scope over a complex predicate: these are -mirri ‘quickly,’ -je, -ji ‘again,’ and -biji ‘repeatedly’ (§10.1.1 (iii)). Of these, -mirri attaches only to preverbs, and -je and -biji attach to both preverbs and finite verbs. Sentence examples showing the use of -je/-ji may be seen at (10.15a, 10.61c) and (15.10f), and those showing the use of -mirri may be seen at (8.26b) and (8.28b). The clause-linking morpheme -maade ‘so, result’ (§8.2.4) is found after preverbs and also after nouns, deictics, adjectives in preverbal position, and most frequently after finite verbs. The enclitics -nyini ‘endpoint, until’ (§10.1.2 (v)), and -nyale ‘next in sequence’ (§10.6.4 (i)) appear to be unrestricted in their distribution, attaching to members of nearly every lexical category.

This chapter is concerned with nouns as word-forms that refer to types of things, while Chapter Six deals with nominal expressions as denoting instances of those types (cf Langacker 1991:51). Worrorra referring expressions may be described by reference to at least three independent parameters with formal consequences:

Classificatory

Worrorra nouns occur as members of one of five classes or genders. These are a masculine class, a feminine class, a celestial class, a terrestrial class, and a minor class of collective nouns containing probably about a dozen members. Although some genders may be neutralized in some situations (see especially Chapter Nine), genders and noun classes do not constitute separate categories in Worrorra, as they do in some languages such as Mayali (Evans 2003), so that the terms ‘gender’ and ‘noun class’ may be used here synonymously. The two non-human genders referred to here and in Clendon (1999) as celestial and terrestrial, are referred to by Love (1934) as the wuna and mana classes respectively. Love named these genders after the definite articles used with their members (wunu and mana in my experience) (see Chapter Seven). Gender-marking is exhaustive and unique; the gender of the head of a noun phrase controls agreement on adjectives, inalienable nouns, pronouns and verbs and is essentially invariable with respect to each noun. Gender in Worrorra is described in §4.1.

Substitution

This chapter is concerned primarily with anaphora and deixis in Worrorra, involving the substitution of a set of replacement forms for other expressions. The expressions usually substituted for in Worrorra are noun phrases and sentences, the replacement forms comprising a lexical category of pronouns, including demonstrative pronouns.

Worrorra pronouns and demonstratives make primary reference to the substantive person, number and gender categories or agreement classes whose tokens, as inflexional (§5.3.1) and derivational (§6.1) NP indices, have already been encountered. The grammar treats sentences and sentential complements of all sorts as if they were celestial, or occasionally terrestrial nouns (§4.1.3 (iii)). While these person-and-number categories are evidenced widely in the morphology, this chapter is concerned primarily with their manifestation as lexical words.

Because of the small number of Worrorra speakers, I have not been able to observe much of the indexical use of person-and-number categories, that may have pertained between different classes of kin, between different age groups, between men and women, or in various social circumstances and ritual contexts. The material presented in this chapter, therefore, suffers from that deficiency. One observation, however, may be noted here, and that has to do with a function that I will refer to as diffuse reference.

Diffuse reference is found in euphemistic constructions used in referring to socially or physically dangerous things. Such reference is signalled by the use of the third person plural category, especially in situations where other categories could be expected. The use of the non-participant third person category precludes dangerous things from being represented in the speech event itself, that is to say, third person reference enables people to undertake a speech act while yet excluding unwanted things from participating in the act.

Worrorra phonology will be discussed here in fairly concrete terms in line with classical phonemic analysis, the function of which is to arrive at a clear statement of native speakers' articulatory goals. Phonetic representations will be enclosed in square brackets ([x]), while phonemic representations will be enclosed in diagonal lines (/x/) or italicized. Representations of morphophonemes and morphological forms are enclosed within vertical lines (|x|).

The evidence for the articulatory data presented here is impressionistic, formed during extended fieldwork at Mowanjum and during many hours of listening to recorded speech. Although no spectrographic images of speech segments will be presented, the claims made here are able to be tested by reference to my original recordings, which are all archived with the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies.

Phonological features

Worrorra phonemes may be described in terms of the set of features displayed in Table 2.1. All phonemes in this table are listed by their ‘elsewhere’ forms in IPA (phonetic) script, and also in the orthography in which Worrorra materials have been published by the Kimberley Language Centre.

To a certain extent decisions about the feature system can be read from the morphophonemic rules that drive the grammar, as outlined in Chapter Three. These rules provide an empirical basis for feature selection, in that they define classes of sounds to which the morphology is sensitive.

In undertaking an act of reference, a speaker must fulfil at least two conditions (Searle 1969, Silverstein 1986); the first consists of denoting a type of referent, and the second of identifying a particular instance of such a type. A nominal expression therefore includes a simple noun as well as some referential extension of it, in order to pick out, among all the instances of a particular denotatum that may exist in the world, just which instance or set of instances may be uniquely intended. Extensions of this sort are typically created by way of co-reference, which consists of a relationship between a word used to denote a type of thing in the world, and other words or morphemes that are dependent upon it for their referential value.

In this chapter and elsewhere the term ‘noun phrase’ or ‘NP’ will be used fairly informally to refer to any nominal expression, the tokens of which depend for their reference on a noun (lexical or derived) acting as the syntactic head of that expression. The literature on non-configurationality, discontinuous NPs and constituency generally in Australian languages is considerable (see, eg, Austin & Bresnan 1996 and references therein), and no more than a rather loose and informal characterization of this phrase type will be attempted here.

In Worrorra, agreement morphology is used to signal coreference. In this chapter we will look at adjectives and other more or less adjective-like or nominal expressions, and particularly at the ways in which agreement occurs between head nouns and their referential extensions. As Nichols (1986:57- 58) puts it, ‘the function of the morphology of government, agreement, cross-reference etc, is to identify syntactic relations by appropriately marking either the head … or the dependent.’

This appendix briefly outlines just a few of the more interesting and accessible publications on Worrorra culture and society, and some on related and neighbouring languages.

Although by now a little out of date, the best bibliography of manuscripts and publications directly relating to Worrorra may be found in William McGregor (1988) Handbook of Kimberley Languages v 1, as well as references to materials on related and neighbouring languages. McGregor's Languages of the Kimberley, Western Australia (2004) likewise contains extensive information on Worrorra and its neighbouring languages. The Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies' on-line Mura catalogue (<http://www.aiatsis.gov.au/collections/muraread.html>) has an even longer list of references (over 250), found by searching under both ‘Worora’ and ‘Worrorra.’

The predecessors to this description of Worrorra grammar are A Grammar of Worrorra (Clendon 2000) and a Worrorra Dictionary, both available from the Kimberley Language Centre. The dictionary has been published by the language centre as A Provisional Worrorra Dictionary (Clendon et al 2000). Both these works are intended for use as resources in any future language revival programme that Worrorra people may decide to undertake.

Major accessible published accounts of Worrorra society and culture include pre-eminently J R B Love's Stone-Age Bushmen of To-day (1936, reissued 2009), and the film Lalai Dreamtime. The eminent scholar of Kimberley rock art, David Welch, has re-issued Love's book under the title Kimberley people: Stone-Age Bushmen of To-day.

The core reference of the word Worrorra (/Wrrorra/) is linguistic, being applied traditionally to the language spoken as a first language by about a dozen related extended families in Australia's north-west Kimberley region. The extended reference of the word, however, was applied as well to the people, the land and the culture of those families. At the time of sustained European contact (1912) there were an estimated 300 people who spoke Worrorra as their first language, and probably at least twice that number again who spoke it as a second language.

The language described here is that attested by Patsy Lulpunda (phonemic /lalbanda/), Daisy Utemorrah and Amy Peters, all now deceased, at Mowanjum near Derby in Western Australia. The study was undertaken initially at the request of their niece Heather Umbagai, and the original project was funded by the Kimberley Language Resource Centre at Halls Creek.

Worrorra people moved out of their traditional lands to Mowanjum in 1956, and today live mostly at Mowanjum and Derby, while some live on Mount Barnett station and at Kalumburu. Since 1956 Worrorra people have lived at Mowanjum in close daily contact with people who spoke either Ungarinyin or Wunambal as their first language, and by the 1970s Ungarinyin had become the lingua franca there.

The Origins of Literary Adelaide

All cities are literary cities: places where people read, places where people write, places people write about. Perhaps, though, not all cities can claim to have their very origins in the domain of the literary. The theory of ‘systematic colonisation’, on which the European settlement of South Australia was based, received its first book-length airing in 1829 in Edward Gibbon Wakefield's A Letter from Sydney, but the volume was hardly the straightforward, first-hand account of life in New South Wales implied by its title. In her essay in Adelaide: A Literary City, Kerryn Goldsworthy describes Wakefield's volume as ‘a factual document using fiction-writing techniques’ (23). A recent PhD thesis calls it ‘largely a work of imaginative speculation’ (Radzevicius 8).

Even if A Letter from Sydney counts in some senses as ‘literary’, much more relevant to Adelaide's future life as a literary city is its central argument. Wakefield's book sets out a utopian vision of a new colony in which literature might have an integral place. Its narrator criticises Sydney, finding that ‘intellectual society’ is notably absent and observing that writers, scientists and philosophers are unlikely to emigrate to locations where their skills will not be valued and rewarded (40). By contrast, he asserts that a colony based on his principles will attract a long list of British citizens, including all the components of a literary culture: ‘printers, schoolmasters and schoolmistresses, booksellers, authors, publishers, and even reviewers’ (187).