Warlpiri/Midterm

Notes for midterm evaluation

General

• 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

Evaluation

• 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 added with hyphens, so most words contain hyphens.
• Total number of tokens: 1416 and total number of analyses: 1574, which means that I have some ambiguity to sort through.

Challenges

• 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.
  • I have a tag for each one of these combinations.
  • 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.