Research Articles

Main clause TAM-marking in Ngarla (Pama-Nyungan), in comparison with two neighbouring languages

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Abstract

The aim of this paper is to give a brief description of the tense, aspect and mood distinctions (henceforth TAM) made in main clauses in the everyday speech style of Ngarla (Pama-Nyungan, Ngayarta), an understudied Australian language. Comparisons with two adjacent languages, Nyangumarta and Nyamal, will also be made. Following Comrie (1999: 363, cf. Comrie 1985), tense is here defined as a grammatical category that ‘serves to locate situations […] in time’. In line with Dahl (1999: 30), the term aspect is used to refer ‘to the ways in which states of affairs may be related to time’. The term ‘mood’, finally, is employed for markers of the status of a proposition (cf. Palmer 2001).

The systems of verbal inflections found in Australian languages are very diverse, with great variations both in the meanings expressed, and in the number of distinctions made. As will be illustrated in this paper, there are main clause tense and mood categories in Ngarla, as well as categories that include both tense and aspect information, and tense and mood information. Many of the TAM-categories are shared with Nyamal and Nyangumarta, but similarities in the shape of TAM suffixes will be demonstrated to exist mainly between...

Keywords: Australia, Ngarla, Pama-Nyungan, Nyangumarta, Nyamal, tense, aspect and mood distinctions, TAM, verbal inflections

How to Cite:

Westerlund, T., (2011) “Main clause TAM-marking in Ngarla (Pama-Nyungan), in comparison with two neighbouring languages”, Language Documentation and Description 10, 228-246. doi: https://doi.org/10.25894/ldd196