Marra language
Encyclopedia
Marra is an Australian Aboriginal language, traditionally spoken on an area of the Gulf of Carpentaria
coast in the Northern Territory around the Roper
, Towns and Limmen Rivers. Marra is now an endangered language
. The most recent survey was in 1991; at that time, there were only 15 speakers, all elderly. Most Marra people now speak Kriol
as their main language. The remaining elderly Marra speakers live in the Aboriginal communities of Ngukurr, Numbulwar
, Borroloola
and Minyerri
.
Marra is a prefixing language with three noun classes (masculine, feminine, and neuter) and a singular-plural-dual distinction. It is characterized by an intricate aspectual system, elaborate kin terms
, no definite structure for relative clause construction
, and a complex demonstrative system
. Unlike many languages in the area, it has little avoidance language
and no difference in the speech of male and female speakers.
Marra is closely related to Warndarang, an extinct language
which was traditionally spoken to the north of Marra. The languages Alawa
and Yugul, spoken to the northwest of Marra and both apparently extinct, are also related, and together the four languages make up the "Maran" subgrouping.
, Marra was also in contact with Alawa
(spoken inland, to the west), Binbin-ga and Wilangarra (West Barkly languages to the south), and Yanyuwa (a Pama–Nyungan language to the southeast).
The Marra people were traditionally divided into three clans that lived along the Limmen Bight River in Arnhem Land
(Northern Territory
, Australia
): burdal, murrungun, and mambali. In the 1970s, when the first serious fieldwork was being done on Marra, the mambali clan was extinct, though a family with the surname Riley of the burdal clan and a man by the name of Anday of the murrungun clan were able to provide the linguist Jeffrey Heath with cultural and linguistic information.
The three clans, together with the Warndarrang-speaking guyal group, made up a set of four patrilineal semimoieties, each of which had their own set of songs, myths, and rituals. Each semimoiety was also associated with a totem
(olive python or fork-tailed catfish for mambali, goanna
for guyal, black-headed python or antilopine kangaroo
for burdal, and king brown snake for murrungun) and had responsibilities for that totem. Note that Warndarang people use the same system of semimoieties, under the names mambali, murrungun, wurdal, and guyal (wuyal).
In the years 1973-1975 and 1976–1977, the linguist Jeffrey Heath worked with some of the surviving speakers of Marra to create a sizeable grammar and dictionary. With the help of four principal informants – Mack Riley, Tom Riley, Johnnie (who was Warndarrang but spoke Marra and Nunggubuyu for most of his life), and Anday – Heath was able to collect grammar and vocabulary information as well as extensive texts on clan songs and totem rituals.
With the interdentals excepted, the Marra consonants consist of a stop
and a nasal
in each of five places of articulation
with two laterals
, two rhotics
, and two semivowel
s.
A standard orthography has been developed over several years of work with Diwurruwurru-Jaru Aboriginal Corporation (also known as the Katherine Regional Aboriginal Language Centre). The standard orthography is used throughout this article, but the table below also gives the equivalent IPA
symbols in brackets where appropriate. The interdental sounds have not been included in the table as they are only found in loanwords.
, though the first vowel of a two-syllable word is often lengthened, as are the word-final vowels in a particular style of story-telling. Words cannot begin with a vowel, with the exception of a handful of stems beginning with /a/.
s are homorganic
(involving the same place of articulation) nasal + stop combinations, particularly mb or ngg. The nominative prefix n-, when added to a stem beginning with a cluster, is usually pronounced with the preceding syllable, and the n- with combined with /r/ or /n/ results in the addition of the meaningless particle –nga- between the prefix and the stem.
Word-final consonant clusters can only take the form liquid
(lateral or rhotic) plus noncoronal (labial, laminoalveolar, or velar) stop or nasal. Within a word, triple clusters are limited to a liquid and a homorganic nasal + stop cluster or to a liquid, a noncoronal, and any other consonant. Examples of this include gurralgmaninja “kookaburra (Dacelo leachii)” and bulnggan “extinguished fire.” Many double-consonant clusters can occur.
into a semivowel or lost altogether. /j/ and /ʈ/ will become /y/, /b/ will become /w/, and /g/ will either become /w/ or ø. This lenition can optionally occur at the beginning of a small number of nouns when the stem is preceded by a prefix ending in a vowel.
There are also several instances of word-initial lenition of /g/ or /b/ to /w/, in cardinal directions, kin terms, and a few other isolated examples. At the beginning of verb stems, the underlying combination rrn will have the surface form of n, whereas an n followed by the phonemes l, rl, rr, r, n, or ny in any other context results in the deletion of the initial n.
when followed by a nasal or any other non-stop. Examples of this include the reduplicated man-mad “to mix a lot” from mad “to mix” or the noun + case ending of nga-lurlbam-nyu from lurlbab “juvenile euro (Macropus robustus)”.
Noun phrase
s (NP’s) typically consist of an article, a noun, and the possibilities for adjuncts
, which often but not always follow the main noun.
or non-nominative), gender (masculine, feminine, or neuter), and number (singular, plural, dual
), as follows:
Almost all non-human singular nouns are marked as masculine, though some specifically-female marsupial
terms can be marked as feminine. The neuter case is reserved for body parts, topographic terms, abstract conceptions, and the word gurnarru “sun.”
/instrumental
/genitive, allative/locative, ablative, pergressive, and purposive.
The nominative (-ø) is used for intransitive
subjects or transitive
objects – such a case is usually called the “absolutive,” though some languages to the south of Marra have an “absolutive” case that is distinct from this usage.
The ergative or instrumental case (also –ø, though takes the non-nominative prefix) is used to mark the subject of a transitive verb (the usual meaning of “ergative”) or to mark the object used to complete the action of the verb (the usual meaning of “instrumental”). This case, along with a genitive pronoun, is also used to mark possession (see below).
The allative/locative case (-yurr) signals the idea of direction of motion (“to X”), static location (“in/on/at X”), or motional location (“by/through X”). Though this meaning is within the domain of the pergressive case in many related languages, the Marra pergressive (-ya “through” or “along”) is restricted to body-part or topographic terms.
The ablative case is used to specify the origin of motion. It takes the form –yani for most nouns but -yana for place names.
Lastly, the purposive –ni indicates the goal of the verb, as in the sentence bu-ngarlini na-yija-ni “I set fires for game” (i.e., in order to hunt or obtain game), where the verb bu-ngarlini is intransitive and thus yija “game” takes the purposive and not the nominative.
The numerals six through ten are expressed by combining “five” with another number, e.g., mani n-murrji wurruja wurruja for “nine.” There are also more general quantifiers such as jari and mijimbangu “many,” dangulirrnya “big group” (non-human), garnyirrimba “big group” (human), and murrgu “a few.”
, where some or all of a stem is repeated. With human nouns, reduplication takes the meaning of three or more of that noun, such as jawu-yawulba “three or more old people” from jawulba “old person,” and a few topographic nouns can be reduplicated to mean the collective plural, as in lurlga-lurlga “islands.”
With both human and non-human nouns, reduplication along with the progressive case suffix can create the meaning “having X” or “having lots of X,” as in girri-girriya-ya “having a woman” (being a married man) from girriya “woman.”
A few verb stems also display partial reduplication to indicate a repeated action, as in da-dad-gujujunyi “he repeatedly tied it or them up” as opposed to dad-gujujunyi “he was tying it or them up.”
Personal pronouns have paradigms in seven cases – nominative, emphatic, genitive, ablative, oblique stem
, allative/locative, and purposive – for each of first person (singular, exclusive dual
, inclusive dual
, exclusive plural
, and inclusive plural
), second person (singular, dual, and plural), and third person (masculine singular, feminine singular, neuter singular, dual, and plural).
(in the “predicate” of the sentence, or the part that modifies the subject) or nonpredicative nouns.
Proximate refers to the area around the speaker, the equivalent of “here.” The immediate refers to the area around the person being addressed or to the area approximately two meters away from the speaker. The localized immediate specifies the location, whereas the unlocalized immediate, which is rarer, is more general.
The distant category refers to anything outside of the immediate, either visible to the speaker or invisible. The anaphoric category is anything within the distant category that has previously been referred to, indicating that the location is not new to the discourse.
These pronouns have separate forms for masculine singular, feminine singular, neuter, dual, and plural, each of which has a nominative and non-nominative form. They are generally formed by the prefixes ni- (MSg), ngi- (FSg), n-gi- (Ne), wirr- or warra- (Du), and wil- or wila- (Pl) for the nominative or na- (MSg), ya- (FSg), nya- (Ne), wirri- (Du), and wili- (Pl) for the non-nominative and the suffixes -nya (non-predicative proximate), -n-garra (predicative proximate), -ya (unlocalized immediate), -yarra (localized immediate), -nanya or -ninya (distant), and -nangga or -ningga (anaphoric), though there are irregular forms for some combinations.
From these, one can form demonstrative adverbs, in the locative or allative cases. These have the same spatial meaning as the corresponding demonstrative pronouns, but they refer to a general location rather than the location of a specific noun. The allative forms are summarized in the following table:
To make the locative forms, the gi-/ga- in the table above is replaced by the prefix wi-/nya- (proximate), warri-/nyarri- (immediate), or wani-/nyani- (distant or anaphoric), and the suffix -yu(rr) is added.
.
There are also directional words for “up” and “down” (i.e., upriver, downhill, etc) that display a similar morphological complexity:
Other types of interrogative clauses involve words that can also take an indefinite form, as in ngani, which can mean “who?”, “someone,” or “anyone.” If the distinction between interrogative and indefinite is unclear from context, the adverb jabay “maybe” can be added to indicate that the phrase is an assertion and not a question.
These interrogative words take a prefix to mark number and gender – masculine singular is the default, though any additional presupposed information can be included in the marking. Case suffixes can also be marked. These particles are typically clause-initial and then followed by the assertion whose details are being elicited. For instance, na-nginjani-ni wu-rlini? literally means “for what? he went” with the sense of “why did he go?” and nginjani gana rag-ninyi? means “what? you killed it” or “what did you kill?”
verb-stem, and suffixes marking tense, aspect, and mood. Often, however, there is an uninflectable “main verb” that specifies the meaning of the verb that is then followed by the inflectable “auxiliary verb.” Some verbs in Marra can only be main verbs or auxiliary verbs, though many can serve in both positions.
The benefactive prefix indicates that something was done “for” somebody as, as in ma-rang-nan.ganyi “he killed it for me.” Ma- is used when there is a main-auxiliary distinction; marl- is used when there is only one verb in the complex.
The centripetal particle is used to indicate motion within the speaker’s frame of reference, with the idea of the motion coming “back” or “this way.” It is the only way to distinguish the meaning of verbs “to take” from “to bring” or “to go” from “to come.”
Marra aspect is split between continuous and punctual (also known as “perfective
”) actions, with the former divided into durative (happened throughout) and non-durative (happened over time, but not the entire time). The positive/negative division distinguishes things that did, are, or will happen from things that did not, are not, or will not happen, a category termed in the analyses of some neighboring languages as “irrealis.”
The “future indefinite” category is quite rare and takes the meaning of “might.” The “past potential” refers to something that was just about to happen (but didn’t, due to an interruption) or should have happened.
The evitative category might be translated as “lest” or “or else,” indicating that something undesirable might occur if something else is or is not done. For example, nga-nanggu-wa wuninggi rang-ningganjiyi means “give it to me, or else I will hit you.” Note that the evitative is normally paired with another clause (as Heath says, it “does not normally stand alone as a simple prediction of impending doom”), usually in the imperative
.
The past continuous durative positive, present negative/positive, future indefinite positive, future continuous durative positive, and desiderative positive all take a “durative” morpheme in the verb complex’s “durative stem-initial prefix” slot; all other categories are unmarked.
The forms of these suffixes differ by auxiliary verb.
When the third person or third person subject/third person object category is marked, the additional prefix –wa- is added to the complex.
Within the clause, however, the order of the NPs, verb complexes, and adverbs is free. The first element is typically considered to be the most important element. If the first element is not a verb complex, the main verb complex commonly but not always assumes the second position; there appears to be no difference in meaning between those sentences that place the verb complex in the second position and those that do not.
are typically marked by a particle or conjunction such as bigana “because” or waninggayani “after that.” If, however, the clause can be reduced to a single verb complex, that word is typically nominalized using the suffixes –manjarr or –manggirri and then placed following the head noun.
Marra does not have the complex avoidance speech or male-female language distinction that is found in neighboring Yanyula. Men are, however, not supposed to pronounce the names of their mother-in-law (wife’s mother), their wife’s mother’s brother, or their wife’s brother, though these taboos are relaxed as a man ages.
Marra has a significantly more complex verbal inflection system than Warndarrang (sixteen different tense/aspect/mood categories in Marra but only eight in Warndarrang and apparently seven in Alawa), an unusually intricate system for Australian languages. Both languages, however, have conjugation paradigms that are highly verb-specific.
In addition to the similarities in the order of the verb complex, Marra and Warndarrang also both use word-order to focus, or highlight, a particular item within the clause, though otherwise the word-order in Marra is far stricter than that in Warndarrang.
The directional terminology between Warndarang and Marra shares many cognates, such as garrgali (Marra) and arrgarli (Warndarrang) for “west” or guymi (both languages) for “north,” though Marra again has a far more intricate and irregular morphological system to distinguish cases in these terms. Marra also has an up/down directional distinction that is absent in Warndarrang. There is no Alawa data for cardinal directions.
Gulf of Carpentaria
The Gulf of Carpentaria is a large, shallow sea enclosed on three sides by northern Australia and bounded on the north by the Arafura Sea...
coast in the Northern Territory around the Roper
Roper River
The Roper River is one of the largest rivers in the Northern Territory, Australia, extending east for over 500 km to meet the sea in Limmen Bight on the Gulf of Carpentaria. It is navigable for about 145 km, until the tidal limit at Roper Bar, and forms the southern boundary of the region...
, Towns and Limmen Rivers. Marra is now an endangered language
Endangered language
An endangered language is a language that is at risk of falling out of use. If it loses all its native speakers, it becomes a dead language. If eventually no one speaks the language at all it becomes an "extinct language"....
. The most recent survey was in 1991; at that time, there were only 15 speakers, all elderly. Most Marra people now speak Kriol
Australian Kriol language
Kriol is an Australian creole language that developed initially in the region of Sydney and Newcastle in New South Wales in the early days of White colonisation, and then moved west and north with White and Black stockmen and others...
as their main language. The remaining elderly Marra speakers live in the Aboriginal communities of Ngukurr, Numbulwar
Numbulwar, Northern Territory
Numbulwar is a small, primarily Aboriginal community on the Gulf of Carpentaria in the Northern Territory of Australia.Permanent settlement began in 1952 with the founding of the Rose River Mission by local Aboriginal communities and the Church Missionary Society.The Mission operated until the...
, Borroloola
Borroloola, Northern Territory
Borroloola is a town in the Northern Territory of Australia. It is located on the McArthur River, about 50 km upstream from the Gulf of Carpentaria. At the 2006 census, Borroloola had a population of 773, of whom 579 declared themselves indigenous....
and Minyerri
Minyerri, Northern Territory
Minyerri is located approximately 270 km south-east of Katherine, Northern Territory, Australia by road. A permit is required for non-Aboriginal people to enter the community. The Hodgson River is in close proximity. The area experiences the Wet and Dry seasons, with temperatures ranging from Dry...
.
Marra is a prefixing language with three noun classes (masculine, feminine, and neuter) and a singular-plural-dual distinction. It is characterized by an intricate aspectual system, elaborate kin terms
Kinship terminology
Kinship terminology refers to the various systems used in languages to refer to the persons to whom an individual is related through kinship. Different societies classify kinship relations differently and therefore use different systems of kinship terminology - for example some languages...
, no definite structure for relative clause construction
Relative clause
A relative clause is a subordinate clause that modifies a noun phrase, most commonly a noun. For example, the phrase "the man who wasn't there" contains the noun man, which is modified by the relative clause who wasn't there...
, and a complex demonstrative system
Demonstrative
In linguistics, demonstratives are deictic words that indicate which entities a speaker refers to and distinguishes those entities from others...
. Unlike many languages in the area, it has little avoidance language
Avoidance speech
Avoidance speech, or "mother-in-law languages", is a feature of many Australian Aboriginal languages and some North American languages and Bantu languages of Africa whereby in the presence of certain relatives it is taboo to use everyday speech style, and instead a special speech style must be...
and no difference in the speech of male and female speakers.
Marra is closely related to Warndarang, an extinct language
Extinct language
An extinct language is a language that no longer has any speakers., or that is no longer in current use. Extinct languages are sometimes contrasted with dead languages, which are still known and used in special contexts in written form, but not as ordinary spoken languages for everyday communication...
which was traditionally spoken to the north of Marra. The languages Alawa
Alawa
Alawa are an Indigenous Australian people from the Northern Territory, Australia. They live in an area of abundant food resources i.e. turtles, ducks, crocodiles, and fish. In modern day the Alawa people are involved in ranching. Together with the Ngandji people they have claimed the Cox River...
and Yugul, spoken to the northwest of Marra and both apparently extinct, are also related, and together the four languages make up the "Maran" subgrouping.
Language and Speakers
Marra is a member of the Gunwinyguan family, the second-largest Australian language family after Pama–Nyungan. The Marra people refer to themselves as Marranbala, Marra or Mara, and their language as Marra or Mara. In addition to Warndarrang, which was spoken to the north of Marra along the Roper RiverRoper River
The Roper River is one of the largest rivers in the Northern Territory, Australia, extending east for over 500 km to meet the sea in Limmen Bight on the Gulf of Carpentaria. It is navigable for about 145 km, until the tidal limit at Roper Bar, and forms the southern boundary of the region...
, Marra was also in contact with Alawa
Alawa
Alawa are an Indigenous Australian people from the Northern Territory, Australia. They live in an area of abundant food resources i.e. turtles, ducks, crocodiles, and fish. In modern day the Alawa people are involved in ranching. Together with the Ngandji people they have claimed the Cox River...
(spoken inland, to the west), Binbin-ga and Wilangarra (West Barkly languages to the south), and Yanyuwa (a Pama–Nyungan language to the southeast).
The Marra people were traditionally divided into three clans that lived along the Limmen Bight River in Arnhem Land
Arnhem Land
The Arnhem Land Region is one of the five regions of the Northern Territory of Australia. It is located in the north-eastern corner of the territory and is around 500 km from the territory capital Darwin. The region has an area of 97,000 km² which also covers the area of Kakadu National...
(Northern Territory
Northern Territory
The Northern Territory is a federal territory of Australia, occupying much of the centre of the mainland continent, as well as the central northern regions...
, Australia
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...
): burdal, murrungun, and mambali. In the 1970s, when the first serious fieldwork was being done on Marra, the mambali clan was extinct, though a family with the surname Riley of the burdal clan and a man by the name of Anday of the murrungun clan were able to provide the linguist Jeffrey Heath with cultural and linguistic information.
The three clans, together with the Warndarrang-speaking guyal group, made up a set of four patrilineal semimoieties, each of which had their own set of songs, myths, and rituals. Each semimoiety was also associated with a totem
Totem
A totem is a stipulated ancestor of a group of people, such as a family, clan, group, lineage, or tribe.Totems support larger groups than the individual person. In kinship and descent, if the apical ancestor of a clan is nonhuman, it is called a totem...
(olive python or fork-tailed catfish for mambali, goanna
Goanna
Goanna is the name used to refer to any number of Australian monitor lizards of the genus Varanus, as well as to certain species from Southeast Asia.There are around 30 species of goanna, 25 of which are found in Australia...
for guyal, black-headed python or antilopine kangaroo
Antilopine Kangaroo
The Antilopine Kangaroo sometimes called the Antilopine Wallaroo or the Antilopine Wallaby, is a species of macropod found in northern Australia: in Cape York Peninsula in Queensland, the Top End of the Northern Territory, and the Kimberley region of Western Australia...
for burdal, and king brown snake for murrungun) and had responsibilities for that totem. Note that Warndarang people use the same system of semimoieties, under the names mambali, murrungun, wurdal, and guyal (wuyal).
In the years 1973-1975 and 1976–1977, the linguist Jeffrey Heath worked with some of the surviving speakers of Marra to create a sizeable grammar and dictionary. With the help of four principal informants – Mack Riley, Tom Riley, Johnnie (who was Warndarrang but spoke Marra and Nunggubuyu for most of his life), and Anday – Heath was able to collect grammar and vocabulary information as well as extensive texts on clan songs and totem rituals.
Consonant Inventory
Marra has a consonant inventory nearly identical to those of Warndarrang and Alawa. There are two additional phonemes: the interdental /n̪/ and /l̪/ which occur only in a few flora-fauna terms, and are likely loanwords from either Nunggubuyu or Yanyuwa, both of which languages use these phonemes frequently.With the interdentals excepted, the Marra consonants consist of a stop
Stop consonant
In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or an oral stop, is a stop consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases. The occlusion may be done with the tongue , lips , and &...
and a nasal
Nasal consonant
A nasal consonant is a type of consonant produced with a lowered velum in the mouth, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. Examples of nasal consonants in English are and , in words such as nose and mouth.- Definition :...
in each of five places of articulation
Place of articulation
In articulatory phonetics, the place of articulation of a consonant is the point of contact where an obstruction occurs in the vocal tract between an articulatory gesture, an active articulator , and a passive location...
with two laterals
Lateral consonant
A lateral is an el-like consonant, in which airstream proceeds along the sides of the tongue, but is blocked by the tongue from going through the middle of the mouth....
, two rhotics
Rhotic consonant
In phonetics, rhotic consonants, also called tremulants or "R-like" sounds, are liquid consonants that are traditionally represented orthographically by symbols derived from the Greek letter rho, including "R, r" from the Roman alphabet and "Р, p" from the Cyrillic alphabet...
, and two semivowel
Semivowel
In phonetics and phonology, a semivowel is a sound, such as English or , that is phonetically similar to a vowel sound but functions as the syllable boundary rather than as the nucleus of a syllable.-Classification:...
s.
A standard orthography has been developed over several years of work with Diwurruwurru-Jaru Aboriginal Corporation (also known as the Katherine Regional Aboriginal Language Centre). The standard orthography is used throughout this article, but the table below also gives the equivalent IPA
International Phonetic Alphabet
The International Phonetic Alphabet "The acronym 'IPA' strictly refers [...] to the 'International Phonetic Association'. But it is now such a common practice to use the acronym also to refer to the alphabet itself that resistance seems pedantic...
symbols in brackets where appropriate. The interdental sounds have not been included in the table as they are only found in loanwords.
| Bilabial | Apico-alveolar | Retroflex | Lamino-alveolar | Velar | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stops | b | d | rd [ʈ] | j [c] | g |
| Nasals | m | n | rn [ɳ] | ny [ɲ] | ng [ŋ] |
| Laterals | l | rl [ɭ] | |||
| Rhotics | rr [r] | r [ɻ] | |||
| Semivowels | y [j] | w |
Vowel Inventory
Marra has three main vowels: /i/, /u/, and /a/. The vowel /e/ is found in exactly two words, renburr “paper wasp” and reywuy “sandfly,” and the vowel /o/ in one word, yo!, a common interjection meaning “yes!” found throughout the area, including in the local English-based creole. There is no contrast in Marra vowel lengthVowel length
In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived duration of a vowel sound. Often the chroneme, or the "longness", acts like a consonant, and may etymologically be one, such as in Australian English. While not distinctive in most dialects of English, vowel length is an important phonemic factor in...
, though the first vowel of a two-syllable word is often lengthened, as are the word-final vowels in a particular style of story-telling. Words cannot begin with a vowel, with the exception of a handful of stems beginning with /a/.
Clusters
Vowels clusters do not occur; all but one of adjacent underlying vowels are deleted. The only permitted word-initial consonant clusterConsonant cluster
In linguistics, a consonant cluster is a group of consonants which have no intervening vowel. In English, for example, the groups and are consonant clusters in the word splits....
s are homorganic
Homorganic consonants
Homorganic consonants is a phonetics term for consonant sounds which are articulated in the same position or place of articulation in the mouth, such as , or...
(involving the same place of articulation) nasal + stop combinations, particularly mb or ngg. The nominative prefix n-, when added to a stem beginning with a cluster, is usually pronounced with the preceding syllable, and the n- with combined with /r/ or /n/ results in the addition of the meaningless particle –nga- between the prefix and the stem.
Word-final consonant clusters can only take the form liquid
Liquid consonant
In phonetics, liquids or liquid consonants are a class of consonants consisting of lateral consonants together with rhotics.-Description:...
(lateral or rhotic) plus noncoronal (labial, laminoalveolar, or velar) stop or nasal. Within a word, triple clusters are limited to a liquid and a homorganic nasal + stop cluster or to a liquid, a noncoronal, and any other consonant. Examples of this include gurralgmaninja “kookaburra (Dacelo leachii)” and bulnggan “extinguished fire.” Many double-consonant clusters can occur.
Lenition
In segments that are repeated in a word – either by reduplication or by chance morphology – the second stop is often lenitedLenition
In linguistics, lenition is a kind of sound change that alters consonants, making them "weaker" in some way. The word lenition itself means "softening" or "weakening" . Lenition can happen both synchronically and diachronically...
into a semivowel or lost altogether. /j/ and /ʈ/ will become /y/, /b/ will become /w/, and /g/ will either become /w/ or ø. This lenition can optionally occur at the beginning of a small number of nouns when the stem is preceded by a prefix ending in a vowel.
There are also several instances of word-initial lenition of /g/ or /b/ to /w/, in cardinal directions, kin terms, and a few other isolated examples. At the beginning of verb stems, the underlying combination rrn will have the surface form of n, whereas an n followed by the phonemes l, rl, rr, r, n, or ny in any other context results in the deletion of the initial n.
Nasalization
Stops are frequently nasalizedNasalization
In phonetics, nasalization is the production of a sound while the velum is lowered, so that some air escapes through the nose during the production of the sound by the mouth...
when followed by a nasal or any other non-stop. Examples of this include the reduplicated man-mad “to mix a lot” from mad “to mix” or the noun + case ending of nga-lurlbam-nyu from lurlbab “juvenile euro (Macropus robustus)”.
Nominal Morphology
In Marra, there is no clear grammatical distinction between nouns, adjectives, and adverbs; they are all treated the same morphologically. Personal and demonstrative pronouns, however, each form a distinctive word class, and all can be clearly distinguished from verb complexes.Noun phrase
Noun phrase
In grammar, a noun phrase, nominal phrase, or nominal group is a phrase based on a noun, pronoun, or other noun-like word optionally accompanied by modifiers such as adjectives....
s (NP’s) typically consist of an article, a noun, and the possibilities for adjuncts
Adjunct (grammar)
In linguistics, an adjunct is an optional, or structurally dispensable, part of a sentence that, when removed, will not affect the remainder of the sentence except to discard from it some auxiliary information...
, which often but not always follow the main noun.
Articles
Nouns are usually preceded by an article, which marks case, gender, and number. The nominative articles, for instance, are as follows:| nana | masculine singular |
| ngana | feminine singular |
| n-gana | neuter |
| warra | dual |
| wala | plural |
Case Prefixes
In additional the articles, each noun is marked with a prefix containing information about case (nominativeNominative case
The nominative case is one of the grammatical cases of a noun or other part of speech, which generally marks the subject of a verb or the predicate noun or predicate adjective, as opposed to its object or other verb arguments...
or non-nominative), gender (masculine, feminine, or neuter), and number (singular, plural, dual
Dual (grammatical number)
Dual is a grammatical number that some languages use in addition to singular and plural. When a noun or pronoun appears in dual form, it is interpreted as referring to precisely two of the entities identified by the noun or pronoun...
), as follows:
| Nom. | Non-Nom. | |
| MSg | ø- | na- |
| FSg | n- | ya- |
| Ne | n- | nya- |
| Du | wurr- | wirri- |
| Pl | wul- | wili- |
Almost all non-human singular nouns are marked as masculine, though some specifically-female marsupial
Marsupial
Marsupials are an infraclass of mammals, characterized by giving birth to relatively undeveloped young. Close to 70% of the 334 extant species occur in Australia, New Guinea, and nearby islands, with the remaining 100 found in the Americas, primarily in South America, but with thirteen in Central...
terms can be marked as feminine. The neuter case is reserved for body parts, topographic terms, abstract conceptions, and the word gurnarru “sun.”
Case Suffixes
Nouns in Marra are marked by suffixes for one of six cases: nominative, ergativeErgative
The term ergative is used in grammar in three different meanings:* Ergative case* Ergative-absolutive language* Ergative verb...
/instrumental
Instrumental
An instrumental is a musical composition or recording without lyrics or singing, although it might include some non-articulate vocal input; the music is primarily or exclusively produced by musical instruments....
/genitive, allative/locative, ablative, pergressive, and purposive.
The nominative (-ø) is used for intransitive
Intransitive verb
In grammar, an intransitive verb is a verb that has no object. This differs from a transitive verb, which takes one or more objects. Both classes of verb are related to the concept of the transitivity of a verb....
subjects or transitive
Transitive verb
In syntax, a transitive verb is a verb that requires both a direct subject and one or more objects. The term is used to contrast intransitive verbs, which do not have objects.-Examples:Some examples of sentences with transitive verbs:...
objects – such a case is usually called the “absolutive,” though some languages to the south of Marra have an “absolutive” case that is distinct from this usage.
The ergative or instrumental case (also –ø, though takes the non-nominative prefix) is used to mark the subject of a transitive verb (the usual meaning of “ergative”) or to mark the object used to complete the action of the verb (the usual meaning of “instrumental”). This case, along with a genitive pronoun, is also used to mark possession (see below).
The allative/locative case (-yurr) signals the idea of direction of motion (“to X”), static location (“in/on/at X”), or motional location (“by/through X”). Though this meaning is within the domain of the pergressive case in many related languages, the Marra pergressive (-ya “through” or “along”) is restricted to body-part or topographic terms.
The ablative case is used to specify the origin of motion. It takes the form –yani for most nouns but -yana for place names.
Lastly, the purposive –ni indicates the goal of the verb, as in the sentence bu-ngarlini na-yija-ni “I set fires for game” (i.e., in order to hunt or obtain game), where the verb bu-ngarlini is intransitive and thus yija “game” takes the purposive and not the nominative.
Possession
Possession is typically marked by a genitive pronoun, though if the possessor noun (in the ergative/instrumental case) is present the pronoun is sometimes omitted. For example, n-nga-radburr n-jawurru means “his camp” with the third person singular genitive pronoun jawurru, and either nariyi-marr n-nga-radburr n-jawurru or nariyi-marr n-nga-radburr can mean “the man’s camp.”Quantifiers
Marra has five basic numerals, one through five:| wanggij or wangginy | one |
| wurruja | two |
| wurruja-gayi | three (“two-another”) |
| wurruja wurruja | four (“two two”) |
| mani n-murrji | five (“like hand”) |
The numerals six through ten are expressed by combining “five” with another number, e.g., mani n-murrji wurruja wurruja for “nine.” There are also more general quantifiers such as jari and mijimbangu “many,” dangulirrnya “big group” (non-human), garnyirrimba “big group” (human), and murrgu “a few.”
Reduplication
Like many Australian languages, Marra has a process known as reduplicationReduplication
Reduplication in linguistics is a morphological process in which the root or stem of a word is repeated exactly or with a slight change....
, where some or all of a stem is repeated. With human nouns, reduplication takes the meaning of three or more of that noun, such as jawu-yawulba “three or more old people” from jawulba “old person,” and a few topographic nouns can be reduplicated to mean the collective plural, as in lurlga-lurlga “islands.”
With both human and non-human nouns, reduplication along with the progressive case suffix can create the meaning “having X” or “having lots of X,” as in girri-girriya-ya “having a woman” (being a married man) from girriya “woman.”
A few verb stems also display partial reduplication to indicate a repeated action, as in da-dad-gujujunyi “he repeatedly tied it or them up” as opposed to dad-gujujunyi “he was tying it or them up.”
Personal Pronouns
In addition to the pronoun markers on nouns (see above) and verbs (see below), Marra also has independent personal pronouns. Unlike other nouns, pronouns do not show a nominative/ergative distinction but instead use the nominative form to mark all subjects as well as the direct object of a transitive verb. Because these pronouns are marked within the verb clause, their inclusion is often optional and can be used to highlight a particular point in what is known as the “emphatic” case.Personal pronouns have paradigms in seven cases – nominative, emphatic, genitive, ablative, oblique stem
Oblique case
An oblique case in linguistics is a noun case of synthetic languages that is used generally when a noun is the object of a verb or a preposition...
, allative/locative, and purposive – for each of first person (singular, exclusive dual
Clusivity
In linguistics, clusivity is a distinction between inclusive and exclusive first-person pronouns and verbal morphology, also called inclusive "we" and exclusive "we"...
, inclusive dual
Clusivity
In linguistics, clusivity is a distinction between inclusive and exclusive first-person pronouns and verbal morphology, also called inclusive "we" and exclusive "we"...
, exclusive plural
Clusivity
In linguistics, clusivity is a distinction between inclusive and exclusive first-person pronouns and verbal morphology, also called inclusive "we" and exclusive "we"...
, and inclusive plural
Clusivity
In linguistics, clusivity is a distinction between inclusive and exclusive first-person pronouns and verbal morphology, also called inclusive "we" and exclusive "we"...
), second person (singular, dual, and plural), and third person (masculine singular, feminine singular, neuter singular, dual, and plural).
Demonstrative Pronouns
There are five categories for demonstrative pronouns: proximate, localized immediate, unlocalized immediate, distant, and anaphoric. With the proximate stems, there are separate forms for predicativePredicate (grammar)
There are two competing notions of the predicate in theories of grammar. Traditional grammar tends to view a predicate as one of two main parts of a sentence, the other being the subject, which the predicate modifies. The other understanding of predicates is inspired from work in predicate calculus...
(in the “predicate” of the sentence, or the part that modifies the subject) or nonpredicative nouns.
Proximate refers to the area around the speaker, the equivalent of “here.” The immediate refers to the area around the person being addressed or to the area approximately two meters away from the speaker. The localized immediate specifies the location, whereas the unlocalized immediate, which is rarer, is more general.
The distant category refers to anything outside of the immediate, either visible to the speaker or invisible. The anaphoric category is anything within the distant category that has previously been referred to, indicating that the location is not new to the discourse.
These pronouns have separate forms for masculine singular, feminine singular, neuter, dual, and plural, each of which has a nominative and non-nominative form. They are generally formed by the prefixes ni- (MSg), ngi- (FSg), n-gi- (Ne), wirr- or warra- (Du), and wil- or wila- (Pl) for the nominative or na- (MSg), ya- (FSg), nya- (Ne), wirri- (Du), and wili- (Pl) for the non-nominative and the suffixes -nya (non-predicative proximate), -n-garra (predicative proximate), -ya (unlocalized immediate), -yarra (localized immediate), -nanya or -ninya (distant), and -nangga or -ningga (anaphoric), though there are irregular forms for some combinations.
From these, one can form demonstrative adverbs, in the locative or allative cases. These have the same spatial meaning as the corresponding demonstrative pronouns, but they refer to a general location rather than the location of a specific noun. The allative forms are summarized in the following table:
| Proximate predicative | gin.garra |
| Proximate non-predicative | ginya |
| Unlocalized immediate | gaya |
| Localized immediate | gayarra |
| Distant | gananya |
| Anaphoric | ganangga |
To make the locative forms, the gi-/ga- in the table above is replaced by the prefix wi-/nya- (proximate), warri-/nyarri- (immediate), or wani-/nyani- (distant or anaphoric), and the suffix -yu(rr) is added.
Cardinal Directions
Like many of the languages of Arnhem Land, Marra’s cardinal directions correspond closely with English “north, south, east, west,” but have intricate case morphologyMorphology (linguistics)
In linguistics, morphology is the identification, analysis and description, in a language, of the structure of morphemes and other linguistic units, such as words, affixes, parts of speech, intonation/stress, or implied context...
.
| West | East | North | South | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Simple locative (“in the west”) | garrgali | gangu | guymi | bayi |
| Distant locative (“far in the west”) | garrgala | ganga | guyma | baya |
| Emphatic distant locative | garrgarrgala | ganga-ganga | guyma-guyma | baya-baya |
| Pergressive (“along/across the west”) | garrgala-marryi | ganga-marryi | guyma-marryi | baya-marryi |
| Allative (“westward”) | warrgali | nguwirri | yimbirri | wayburri |
| Ablative (“from the west”) | warrgali-yana | wangga-yana | yimi-yana | wa-yana |
| Lateral (“on the western side”) | warrgarrgali-yana | wanggangga-yana | yimiyimi-yana | wayawa-yana |
There are also directional words for “up” and “down” (i.e., upriver, downhill, etc) that display a similar morphological complexity:
| up | down | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| locative | garraja | locative (inside, under) | yigal |
| locative | warraja | locative (on the bottom) | wurlungun |
| pergressive | warraja–marryi | pergressive (along the bottom) | wurlungun-marryi |
| allative (uphill, upriver) | warrajarri | pergressive (inside, along the bottom) | wurlungunyi |
| vertical allative (straight up) | garraja-wili | allative (downward) | warlburri |
| lateral | warraji-yana | ablative (from below) | wirlyana |
| lateral | warrarraji-yana | lateral (on the bottom side) | wirlya-wirl-yana |
Interrogation
Yes-no questions in Marra are identical to assertions, with a slight intonation difference. There is no tag for these statements (an equivalent to the English “right?” or “aren’t you?”), though the local English-based creole’s question marker ngi occasionally appears in modern Marra speech.Other types of interrogative clauses involve words that can also take an indefinite form, as in ngani, which can mean “who?”, “someone,” or “anyone.” If the distinction between interrogative and indefinite is unclear from context, the adverb jabay “maybe” can be added to indicate that the phrase is an assertion and not a question.
These interrogative words take a prefix to mark number and gender – masculine singular is the default, though any additional presupposed information can be included in the marking. Case suffixes can also be marked. These particles are typically clause-initial and then followed by the assertion whose details are being elicited. For instance, na-nginjani-ni wu-rlini? literally means “for what? he went” with the sense of “why did he go?” and nginjani gana rag-ninyi? means “what? you killed it” or “what did you kill?”
Verbal Morphology
A basic verb complex in Marra consists of a pronominal prefix, an inflectableInflection
In grammar, inflection or inflexion is the modification of a word to express different grammatical categories such as tense, grammatical mood, grammatical voice, aspect, person, number, gender and case...
verb-stem, and suffixes marking tense, aspect, and mood. Often, however, there is an uninflectable “main verb” that specifies the meaning of the verb that is then followed by the inflectable “auxiliary verb.” Some verbs in Marra can only be main verbs or auxiliary verbs, though many can serve in both positions.
Order of the Verb Complex
The morphemes of the verb are ordered in the complex as follows:- Negative (prefix gu- or preceding word ganagu or ŋula)
- Benefactive ma- or marl-
- Main verb
- Centripetal ya- or nga-
- Third person present marker –wa-
- Pronoun prefix
- Reduplication of any prior prefixes
- Durative stem-initial prefix
- Auxiliary verb
- Tense, aspect, mood suffix
- Reflexive/reciprocal suffix -rlana
The benefactive prefix indicates that something was done “for” somebody as, as in ma-rang-nan.ganyi “he killed it for me.” Ma- is used when there is a main-auxiliary distinction; marl- is used when there is only one verb in the complex.
The centripetal particle is used to indicate motion within the speaker’s frame of reference, with the idea of the motion coming “back” or “this way.” It is the only way to distinguish the meaning of verbs “to take” from “to bring” or “to go” from “to come.”
Inflectional Categories
Marra has sixteen possible inflectional (tense/aspect/mood) categories:- Past punctual positive
- Past continuous durative positive
- Past continuous nondurative positive
- Past potential positive
- Past potential negative
- Past negative
- Present negative
- Present positive
- Evitative positive
- Future indefinite positive
- Future punctual positive
- Future continuous durative positive
- Future continuous nondurative positive
- Imperative positive
- Desiderative positive
- Future negative
Marra aspect is split between continuous and punctual (also known as “perfective
Perfective aspect
The perfective aspect , sometimes called the aoristic aspect, is a grammatical aspect used to describe a situation viewed as a simple whole, whether that situation occurs in the past, present, or future. The perfective aspect is equivalent to the aspectual component of past perfective forms...
”) actions, with the former divided into durative (happened throughout) and non-durative (happened over time, but not the entire time). The positive/negative division distinguishes things that did, are, or will happen from things that did not, are not, or will not happen, a category termed in the analyses of some neighboring languages as “irrealis.”
The “future indefinite” category is quite rare and takes the meaning of “might.” The “past potential” refers to something that was just about to happen (but didn’t, due to an interruption) or should have happened.
The evitative category might be translated as “lest” or “or else,” indicating that something undesirable might occur if something else is or is not done. For example, nga-nanggu-wa wuninggi rang-ningganjiyi means “give it to me, or else I will hit you.” Note that the evitative is normally paired with another clause (as Heath says, it “does not normally stand alone as a simple prediction of impending doom”), usually in the imperative
Imperative mood
The imperative mood expresses commands or requests as a grammatical mood. These commands or requests urge the audience to act a certain way. It also may signal a prohibition, permission, or any other kind of exhortation.- Morphology :...
.
The past continuous durative positive, present negative/positive, future indefinite positive, future continuous durative positive, and desiderative positive all take a “durative” morpheme in the verb complex’s “durative stem-initial prefix” slot; all other categories are unmarked.
The forms of these suffixes differ by auxiliary verb.
Pronominal prefixes
As in Warndarrang and other related languages, a different pronominal prefix is added to the verb for each combination of subject and object. For example, a verb with a second-person singular subject and a first-person exclusive dual object would take the prefix nirrgu- but the person-person exclusive dual subject with a third-person dual object would take the prefix nimbirr-. Within the second-person subject, third-person object paradigm, there are also different pronouns for imperative and non-imperative verbs. There are extremely complicated rules, with many exceptions, for generating these pronouns.When the third person or third person subject/third person object category is marked, the additional prefix –wa- is added to the complex.
Word Order
Within a noun phrase (NP) or verb complex, word order is almost completely fixed. Articles are followed by demonstrative pronouns are followed by the main noun are followed by adjectives, though genitive pronouns may either follow or precede the main noun. For verbs, the negative particles must immediately precede the verb complex, and within the complex the order of the morphemes is strictly set.Within the clause, however, the order of the NPs, verb complexes, and adverbs is free. The first element is typically considered to be the most important element. If the first element is not a verb complex, the main verb complex commonly but not always assumes the second position; there appears to be no difference in meaning between those sentences that place the verb complex in the second position and those that do not.
Subordinated Clauses
Subordinated clausesDependent clause
In linguistics, a dependent clause is a clause that augments an independent clause with additional information, but which cannot stand alone as a sentence. Dependent clauses modify the independent clause of a sentence or serve as a component of it...
are typically marked by a particle or conjunction such as bigana “because” or waninggayani “after that.” If, however, the clause can be reduced to a single verb complex, that word is typically nominalized using the suffixes –manjarr or –manggirri and then placed following the head noun.
Avoidance Terminology
Marra, like many languages of the area, has taboos preventing the direct interaction of siblings of the opposite sex, beginning around age eight (the age of circumcision in males). The only specific avoidance term in Marra, however, is marlayarra, used by a sister of a boy who has been circumcised to address or refer to him – in any other situation, the term for a circumcised boy is warlima.Marra does not have the complex avoidance speech or male-female language distinction that is found in neighboring Yanyula. Men are, however, not supposed to pronounce the names of their mother-in-law (wife’s mother), their wife’s mother’s brother, or their wife’s brother, though these taboos are relaxed as a man ages.
Comparison of the Marran Languages
Warndarrang (a language not spoken since 1974) and Marra (a language with only a small number of speakers) are each other’s closest relatives. Together with Alawa (also critically endangered) and Yugul (a language attested by speakers of Warndarrang, Marra, and Alawa but apparently extinct, these languages form the Marran subgroup of the Gunwinyguan language family. The three documented languages share much vocabulary and have many similar grammatical structures, though there are significant differences, and Warndarrang has been heavily influenced by loanwords from Nunggubuyu and Ngandi to the north.Verbal Comparison
All three languages are prefixing, and their verbs consist of either a single inflected stem or an uninflected “main verb” preceding an inflected auxiliary verb. Such verbal particles are absent in the languages to the north. The Marran languages also share verbal features such as particle reduplication within the verbal complex indicating a repeated or continuous action (a pattern common in Australian languages), and the negation of verbs is indicated by a particle immediately preceding the verb complex (gu in both Warndarang and Marra but ngayi in Alawa).Marra has a significantly more complex verbal inflection system than Warndarrang (sixteen different tense/aspect/mood categories in Marra but only eight in Warndarrang and apparently seven in Alawa), an unusually intricate system for Australian languages. Both languages, however, have conjugation paradigms that are highly verb-specific.
In addition to the similarities in the order of the verb complex, Marra and Warndarrang also both use word-order to focus, or highlight, a particular item within the clause, though otherwise the word-order in Marra is far stricter than that in Warndarrang.
Nominal Comparison
Alawa divides its nouns into two genders (masculine and feminine) while Marra has three classes (masculine, feminine, and neuter) and Warndarrang six. All three languages distinguish between singular, dual, and plural, with Warndarrang having an additional “paucal” (three to five) class for human nouns. The use of noun cases in Warndarrang and Marra are nearly identical – Marra condenses the allative and locative cases and adds a pergressive case – though the only cognate across the paradigm is the purposive -ni. The case marking system of Alawa is apparently not related. The demonstratives in Warndarrang and Marra cover approximately the same semantic categories (proximate, immediate, distant, and anaphoric, though Warndarrang adds an intermediate near-distant), though the forms themselves have little similarity. In fact, the Marra demonstratives inflect for case, number, and gender, while Warndarrang demonstratives engage a single basic form. Again, the Alawa demonstrative system is entirely separate, drawing only a single distance distinction (“this” versus “that”) but with more nuanced anaphoric distinctions.The directional terminology between Warndarang and Marra shares many cognates, such as garrgali (Marra) and arrgarli (Warndarrang) for “west” or guymi (both languages) for “north,” though Marra again has a far more intricate and irregular morphological system to distinguish cases in these terms. Marra also has an up/down directional distinction that is absent in Warndarrang. There is no Alawa data for cardinal directions.