User:Mfechter26/bardi

Final draft is on a new page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mfechter26/bardi-final

Bardi is an endangered language in the Nyulnyulan family. It is spoken in Northwestern Australia, on the Dampier peninsula and neighboring islands. Fewer than 10 speakers of Bardi remain alive today. Before European settlement at the end of the nineteenth century, the population size is estimated to have been ~1500 people, with essentially the entire community speaking Bardi. Since then, the ethnic population has increased in number, but is essentially monolingual in English today (only the oldest few people are still fluent in Bardi). That said, many middle-aged people can still understand the language, and some of them can speak it to a limited degree.

Vowels
Bardi contains seven phonemes in its vowel inventory. These are depicted in IPA form in the table below:

Consonants
Bardi contains 17 phonemes in its consonant inventory, across five places of articulation and five manners of articulation. They are depicted in the table below.

Syllable Structure
Bardi's syllabic template is (C)V(C)(C)(C). Words that exemplify each of these possible syllable structures are shown in the table below.

Stress
Bardi has a demarcative stress system, in that stress can signal the boundaries between words and morphemes.

Primary stress is predictable and consistently falls on the initial syllable of the word. All phonological words in Bardi receive a primary stress. In fact, primary stress even falls on the initial syllable of borrowed words that placed the stress elsewhere in their language of origin.

In contrast to primary stress, secondary stress in Bardi is highly complex.

Stress alone never distinguishes between minimal pairs in Bardi.

Morphology
Bardi is highly affixal, containing both derivational and inflectional affixation.

Nominal derivational morphology
Nominal morphology in Bardi consists almost exclusively of suffixation derivational affixation. Nouns can only take a single derivational suffix, however, as Bardi does not allow for multiple derivation. Little of Bardi's derivational morphology is productive or involves a change in word class.

The most common derivational morpheme in Bardi is the suffix -iidi. This morpheme attaches to the end of a noun to denote a person who is heavily associated with that area or who has reached a level of expertise in it. For example, joornk means ‘speed,' while joornkiidi means a person who is an expert in speed (i.e., a super fast runner). Similarly, ‘jawaliidi,’ the Bardi word for a storyteller, is derived when this suffix is attached to the noun jawal, meaning ‘story.’ Despite its frequency of use, -iidi is not productive and can only be applied to certain nouns (though there does not appear any systematicity governing which nouns do and do not permit its application).

In addition to -iidi, there are about 20 other nominal derivational morphemes in Bardi. A few of these are displayed in the table below.

Nominal case morphology
Nouns in Bardi also often inflect for case. Case marking is phrasal, as it always occurs on the initial element of the noun phrase. There is no additional way in which case is represented in the phrase (Bardi is unusual in this respect).

Core cases are those able to receive agreement marking on the verb; thus, core case markers indicate argument relations within a clause. In Bardi there are three core cases: ergative, absolutive, and instrumental.

Nouns in Bardi are marked by the ergative case when they are the subject of a transitive verb. Ergative subjects do not need to be animate or personal; for example, gaara, meaning ‘the sea,’ can receive the ergative case marker -nim and thus become gaaranim.

Nouns in Bardi take the absolutive case when they appear as the subject of an intransitive verb or the object (direct or indirect) of a transitive verb. Nouns receiving the absolutive case are unmarked.

When the applicative construction promotes them to the object of the verb, instrumental nouns can receive case agreement on the verb, thus satisfying the primary condition of a core case. In these instances, the instrumental case marker (-nga or -na) denotes that the noun is the instrument or the means by which an action was carried out. Instruments are always inanimate; if animate, they would be given the ergative (or comitative) case instead. Bardi also uses local case markers to indicate spatial relations involving location, motion, and direction. The suffixes used to denote these local cases are listed in the table below.

Verbal morphology
Verbal morphology in Bardi is "quasi-agglutinative," in that much of the morphology is able to be divided into segments. It is also entirely inflectional, with the exception of a single affix with derivational properties. All simple verbal predicates in Bardi consist of a verb inflected for prefixes, suffixes, and clitics. Complex verbal predicates additionally feature an uninflecting preverb before the root. A prefix indicating person is found in all inflecting verbs. Beyond containing this prefix, inflecting verbs can contain up to ten additional prefixes and suffixes which indicate "transitivity, tense, aspect, applicatives, and reflexive/reciprocal derivation."

Two examples of the inflectional affixation within simple verbal predicates can be seen below.

Other Morphological Processes
Though Bardi is highly affixal, it also utilizes other morphological processes, including reduplication, infixation, compounding, and suppletion. Instantiations of each of these processes are outlined below. Bardi employs the morphological processes of reduplication and infixation, as illustrated in the example above. On its own, gardi means ‘to enter.' Gadardi, meaning 'to enter over and over again' is derived from gardi through the joint processes of reduplication and infixation. Reduplication occurs through the repetition of ard and signifies that the action is reoccurring. Given that the morpheme ard attaches within the root gardi, infixation is also at work in this example.

Verbal reduplication in Bardi is primarily used for iterative, distributive, or pluractional functions. Iterative reduplication of a verb marks that its action is repetitive (as seen above). Reduplicating a verb can also mark that the action is distributive, or done multiple times by multiple parties. Pluractionality, or multiple parties engaging in the same action, is also indicated by means of verbal reduplication. As illustrated above, Bardi employs the morphological process of compounding. Compounding is the process of combining two roots to form one compound word. Jamoo means ‘mother’s father’ and gamarda means ‘mother’s mother.' The two are combined to make jamoogamardaanim, meaning ‘grandparents.' This same process is seen at work in a majority of Bardi's kinship terms.

Word Order
Bardi does not encode syntactic information in the order of words at the clausal level. Rather, Bardi has free constituent order.

Consider the sentence “Inanggagaljin baawanim mayi aamba,” which is ordered VSO: In addition to the above construction, all other permutations of this sentence are also possible:


 * Baawanim inanggagaljin mayi aamba
 * Baawanim inanggagaljin aamba mayi.
 * Baawanim mayi inanggagaljin aamba.
 * Aamba inanggagaljin mayi baawanim.
 * Aamba mayi inanggagaljin baawanim.
 * Aamba inanggagaljin baawanim mayi.
 * Mayi inanggagaljin baawanim aamba.
 * Mayi baawanim inanggagaljin aamba.
 * Mayi inanggagaljin baawanim aamba.
 * Mayi inanggagaljin aamba baawanim.
 * Inanggagaljin aamba baawanim mayi.
 * Inanggagaljin mayi baawanim aamba. (etc.)

Other ordering preferences
Though Bardi has free word order, some ordering preferences do exist. These preferences are based on principles of “pragmatics, grounding, and focus.”

Often constituents are located 1) clause-initially or 2) clause-finally based on their contextual relevance.


 * 1) “Focus constituents” are usually clause-initial. These constituents include information bearing contrastive focus (i.e., when multiple parties are contrasted along some dimension), as well as information that is novel (e.g., new characters in a story, or answers to questions).
 * 2) “Non-omitted topics”—information that is old but reintroduced—are usually clause-final. In Bardi, topics that persist in discourse are usually omitted in the sentences following their initial introduction. However, if an old topic is overt it may be reintroduced into the sentence—in which case, it will usually be located in the final position of the clause.