Difference between revisions of "Warlpiri/Midterm"
From LING073
(Created page with "==Notes for Midterm Overview== *Warlpiri is an endangered indigenous language of Australia **Spoken by about 3,000 people in Australia's Northern Territory **part of the Pama...") |
(→Notes for Midterm Overview) |
||
| Line 10: | Line 10: | ||
*Warlpiri has 21 phonemes, and uses a Latin orthography | *Warlpiri has 21 phonemes, and uses a Latin orthography | ||
| + | |||
| + | *Currently getting about 40% coverage of my corpus. I increased this number dramatically this week by adding punctuation, because in Warlpiri, the suffixes are often (but not always) added with hyphens, so most words contain hyphens. | ||
| + | |||
| + | *Understanding the grammar has been the hardest part for me. Luckily Warlpiri is a quite well-studied language, so I've been able to find a few good resources. A few things that have been difficult: | ||
| + | **Warlpiri is an Ergative-Absolutive language: "An ergative–absolutive language is a language in which the single argument ("subject") of an intransitive verb behaves like the object of a transitive verb, and differently from the agent of a transitive verb" (Wikipedia). | ||
| + | **There's a small number of verb roots (about 100), which have tense markers, but there's a huge number of auxiliaries. | ||
| + | **Auxiliaries (along with the verb suffix) identify tense, they identify the relationship between the main and dependent clauses, and they identify the person and number of the subject and object. | ||
| + | **There are 11 different combinations of person/number, because there's a singular/dual/plural distinction as well as an inclusive/exclusive distinction for 1st person dual/plural. | ||
| + | **A challenge that I'm facing with the disambiguation is that word order isn't based on grammatical function, but instead on topic/focus of the conversation. | ||
Revision as of 02:35, 2 March 2017
Notes for Midterm Overview
- Warlpiri is an endangered indigenous language of Australia
- Spoken by about 3,000 people in Australia's Northern Territory
- part of the Pama-Nyungan language family
- Warlpiri is an agglutinative language
- means that grammatical information is encoded in affixes attached to word stems
- Warlpiri words have many suffixes, so sentences have relatively few words
- Warlpiri has 21 phonemes, and uses a Latin orthography
- Currently getting about 40% coverage of my corpus. I increased this number dramatically this week by adding punctuation, because in Warlpiri, the suffixes are often (but not always) added with hyphens, so most words contain hyphens.
- Understanding the grammar has been the hardest part for me. Luckily Warlpiri is a quite well-studied language, so I've been able to find a few good resources. A few things that have been difficult:
- Warlpiri is an Ergative-Absolutive language: "An ergative–absolutive language is a language in which the single argument ("subject") of an intransitive verb behaves like the object of a transitive verb, and differently from the agent of a transitive verb" (Wikipedia).
- There's a small number of verb roots (about 100), which have tense markers, but there's a huge number of auxiliaries.
- Auxiliaries (along with the verb suffix) identify tense, they identify the relationship between the main and dependent clauses, and they identify the person and number of the subject and object.
- There are 11 different combinations of person/number, because there's a singular/dual/plural distinction as well as an inclusive/exclusive distinction for 1st person dual/plural.
- A challenge that I'm facing with the disambiguation is that word order isn't based on grammatical function, but instead on topic/focus of the conversation.
