Full Description
R. M. W. Dixon's landmark 1972 grammar of the Dyirbal language of North Queensland is one of the best-known and most widely-cited language descriptions in the history of linguistics. In the fifty years since its publication, Dixon has continued his detailed work on the language, extending and refining the descriptions in light of more recent theoretical advances. The resulting A New Grammar of Dyirbal offers a comprehensive contemporary grammar of the language, reanalysed in myriad ways and drawing on an extensive corpus of texts. Among its many new features are further discussion of the applicative/causative derivation; a fresh focus on the role of the pervasive 'pivot', the syntactic linking of S and O functions; a detailed account of the two antipassives and their semantic contrast and phonological conditioning; and an extended account of relative clauses. The volume is accompanied by a companion website hosting the full set of textual data on which the grammar is based, as well as a thesaurus/dictionary of nouns, adjectives, and verbs across ten dialects of Dyirbal.
Contents
Preface
Abbreviations and conventions
Dialects and data
1: Overview
2: The S/O pivot
3: Nominal morphology
4: Questions
5: The number system
6: Relative clauses
7: Possession
8: Verbal structure and the consequence suffix
9: The potentiality and caution suffixes
10: The apprehensive suffix
11: The applicative/causative derivation
12: Valency-reducing derivations: antipassives, reflexive, and reciprocal
13: Noun markers, demonstratives, and verb markers-base part
14: Noun markers, demonstratives, and verb markers-ancillaries
15: Verbless clauses
16: Particles
17: Clitics
Appendix: Ambitransitive verbs and like matters
Text 61: How the black goanna changed into a crocodile
References
Vocabulary
Inventory of affixes and clitics
Index
