Polysynthetic Languages

Previous work on Inuit has analyzed the morpheme pi as a ‘dummy root’ or ‘empty stem’; a morphological or phonological filler which satisfies a language-specific requirement that words contain lexical roots. We argue instead that pi is a pro-form similar to English ‘do so’ and ‘one’. As evidence for this analysis we examine the use of pi to avoid repeating constituents, its ability to replace VP-sized constituents, the need for discourse markers in some constructions containing pi, similarities with ‘stem ellipsis’ in Arctic Quebec Inuktitut, and pi’s behaviour in noun-incorporation.

Traditional Tiwi is a language isolate within the Australian language group, traditionally spoken on the Tiwi Islands, north of Darwin. This language exhibits the most complex verb structure of any Australian language. Altogether there are 18 distinct verb slots; 14 prefixes and 4 suffixes. They encode subject, object and oblique arguments, they inflect for tense, aspect and mood, the location and direction of events with respect to the speaker, and the time of day that an event takes place. They also take prefixes and suffixes denoting associated motion, can be argument-raised by a causative or detransitivised by derivational morphology, and can take incorporated nominals, incorporated verbs, and incorporated comitative or privative arguments.
Traditional Tiwi has not been adequately described. Previous descriptions are limited and do not cover verb morphology with enough detail. This thesis brings together previous descriptions, early recorded data, and adds newly collected data and findings to produce an updated description of the language, with special reference to the verb morphology.
I focus in particular on two aspects of the verb morphology: agreement and incorporation. The Traditional Tiwi agreement system of inflecting verbs shows a high degree of complexity due to the interactions between subject, object and tense marking. I argue for the occurrence of an otherwise unreported phenomenon by which agreement affixes can shift between various controllers depending on the morphosyntactic context. Incorporation is also highly complex, as with other northern Australian languages that exhibit this feature. There are four distinct types of incorporation including verb incorporation, comitative and privative constructions, body part incorporation and regular nominal incorporation. I describe these with reference to incorporation phenomena in other Australian languages.
Traditional Tiwi however, is no longer spoken; the last two speakers died in 2012. The majority of the data on which this thesis is based was collected with one of these two last speakers, and therefore represents possibly the last documentary linguistic record of this important language.

This paper focuses on the innovative nature of Sakhalin Ainu with respectto nominalization. Based on a cross-dialectal comparison, I suggest that zero-nominalization [(NP…) V]NP reflects the oldest stage (I), while the strategy ofadding a nominalizing word [(NP…) VNMZ]NP, which proliferates in Hokkaido Ainu, may be regarded as the next stage (II). Finally, in Sakhalin Ainu, non-finite verbal forms containing possessive-style marking [(NP…) V-POSS]NP(III), which can also be used as non-embedded (finite) structures [(NP…) V-POSS]MC (IV) in a broad range of presuppositional contexts, may be regarded as the lastand most innovative stage.

This thesis explores the properties of adjectives and adverbs in Inuit (Eskimo-Aleut), with focus on the Inuktitut dialect group. While the literature on Eskimoan languages has claimed that they lack these categories, I present syntactic evidence for two classes of adjectives, one verb-like and another strictly attributive, as well as a class of adverbs. These categories are then employed to diagnose more general properties of the language including headedness, word-formation, adjunct licensing, and semantic composition.

In the first half of Chapter 2 I demonstrate that verb-like adjectives can be differentiated from verbs insofar as only the former are compatible with a particular copular construction involving modals. Similarly, verb-like adjectives can combine with a negative marker that is incompatible with genuine verbs. This contrast is further corroborated by an inflectional distinction between verb-like adjectives and verbs in the Siglitun dialect. A second class of strictly-attributive adjectives is argued for on the basis of stacking, variable order, optionality, and compositionality. The second half of the chapter examines semantic restrictions on membership in the strictly-attributive class whereby only adjectives with subsective and privative denotations are attested. These restrictions are explained by the proposal that Inuit lacks a rule of Predicate Modification, with the result that only adjectives with semantic types capable of composing with nouns via Functional Application can compose directly with nominals. Furthermore, to explain why this restriction does not extend to verb-like adjectives it is proposed that when these modify nominals, they are adjoined DP appositives and compose via Potts’s (2005) rule of Conventional Implicature Application.

In Chapter 3 I argue for a class of adverbs, presenting evidence including degree modification, variable ordering, speaker-oriented meanings, and the ability to modify additional categories. Finally, data from adverb ordering is used to compare syntactically oriented and semantically oriented approaches to adjunct licensing and verbal-complex formation. I present arguments in favour of a right-headed analysis of Inuit in which the relative position of adverbs inside polysynthetic verbal-complexes is primarily determined by semantics, supporting Ernst (2002), contra cartographic approaches such as Cinque (1999).

Sumerian is a language isolate that was spoken until about four millennia ago in southern Mesopotamia. It is known through thousands of inscriptions written in the cuneiform writing system dating back to the Uruk IV period (4 th millennium b.c.). Sumerian is a nonconfigurational language with a highly synthetic sentence-final verbal complex carrying much of the grammatical information in the sentence. Having had very little formal morphosyntactic treatment within linguistic theory, but having a fairly large corpus of texts preserved and a strong scholarly tradition within Assyriology, Sumerian presents itself a fruitful source of syntactic study.

In this thesis, I argue for an analysis of the syntax of Sumerian as underlyingly configurational, with the verbal complex morphologically realizing the C′ of a clause. All free nominals obligatorily move to vacate the C′ to allow the verbal complex to be realized as a single phonological word, either to higher adjunct positions, yielding the apparent nonconfigurationality of constituents preceding the verbal complex, or by undergoing movement to a dedicated and configurational focus position.

The evidence for this analysis comes in two parts. First, I analyze the A-syntax of Sumerian and show that the split-ergative nature of cross-referencing in the verbal complex and the Dimensionalkasussystem of oblique cross-referencing morphemes can all be explained by syntactic analyses that roughly mirror the morphological structure of the verbal complex. I argue that the apparent asymmetries between the verbal complex and syntactic structure must be explained by morpho-phonological, not syntactic, processes. Then, I analyze two A′ processes in Sumerian, namely V-to-C movement in imperatives and wh-movement in questions, to give further evidence for the claim that free nominals obligatorily vacate from their lower positions into higher positions in the left periphery.

""This article investigates the synchronic status and diachronic origin of an incorporation-like construction in Japhug, a polysynthetic Sino-Tibetan language of Eastern Tibet. This construction constitutes the intermediate stage on a path of development from denominal derivation to incorporation, the opposite of the usual path of development from incorporation to denominal derivation.

Additionally, this article shows that similar phenomena exist in other languages, and that coalescence between noun and verb is not the only attested diachronic origin of incorporating verbs.""

Polysynthesis, broadly understood as extreme morphological complexity of the verb, has been attracting attention of linguists since the advent of linguistic typology in the beginning of the 19th century. Somewhat paradoxically, while the intuition of linguists has to a large extent converged on which languages can be considered “polysynthetic”, the notion itself has so far resisted unequivocal definition. While it is clear that polysynthesis is much more than merely “a high number of morphemes per word” (Mithun 1988 vs. Fortescue 2016), there is no consensus as to which properties usually associated with polysynthesis, e.g. holophrasis, polypersonalism, incorporation, “lexical affixation” etc. are definitional and which should be treated as parameters of variation (e.g. Fortescue 2017 vs. Mattissen 2004, 2006, 2017).
By focusing on the polysynthetic languages of the Northwest Caucasian family (Arkadiev & Lander 2020), on which I have first-hand data, I show how these languages fit within the typology of polysynthesis and in which ways they are special. The most salient polysynthetic feature of Northwest Caucasian is exuberant polypersonalism whereby up to four participants can be expressed by verbal affixes. This is made possible by the existence in these languages of a rich system of applicative prefixes introducing indirect objects of various kinds (cf. “open head marking”, Nichols 2017). A large part of these applicatives express spatial functions and form a cline from genuine “lexical affixes” with a considerable degree of grammaticalisation to incorporated nouns retaining their lexical meaning. These morphological elements have both morphosyntactic and lexical functions, testifying to the lack of clear boundaries between “inflection” and “derivation” (Lander 2016). A large bulk of the Northwest Caucasian morphology serves syntactic purposes. In addition to participant cross-reference and valency-related processes, “syntactic morphology” includes a rich system of marking inter-clausal relations, especially the intricate and typologically unusual encoding of relativisation (Lander & Daniel 2019) employed for externally and internally headed as well as headless relative clauses, the latter serving as the basis for expression of subordination, focus and constituent questions (Caponigro & Polinsky 2011, Arkadiev 2020, Arkadiev & Caponigro 2021).

In Wubuy, a highly endangered polysynthetic language from northern Australia, there are a number of morphosyntactic phenomena that can manipulate how verbal arguments are realised, including causative, affectedness and conjunctive constructions. However, the reasons why these sometimes vary in their effect on argument realisation are unclear, as are the ways they are distributed and constrained. In fact, there are very few descriptions of languages with multiple valency-changing processes that provide detailed accounts of them and how they interact with each other. This is a problem because it means that when we take a given verb, we are unable to predict how (or even if) it can participate in such constructions, nor can we predict what the range of possible interpretations will be.

Through a reconsideration of the current corpus and the collection of new data, this thesis uses empirical description and analysis to investigate the distribution and constraints of causative, affectedness and conjunctive constructions in a number of ways, including: considering how a verb’s transitivity, semantic subclass and argument-structure influences its interaction with derivational morphology and the morphosyntactic realisation of arguments; extending investigations past the current (and crosslinguistically) predominant focus on morphological constructions to also include lexical and syntactic ones; and approaching similar construction types in a unified way (e.g. comparing verb agreement strategies in coordinative, comitative and reciprocal contexts of conjunction). In doing so, this thesis not only clarifies the constraints and interactions mentioned above, it also discovers several construction types that were previously undescribed for Wubuy, some of which are also underdescribed in the broader Australian, polysynthetic and crosslinguistic contexts.

This is a sketch of polysynthesis in Central Alaskan Yupik (CAY) based on the Cup'ik dialect of Chevak, Alaska. CAY has well-defined words whose content is often holophrastic and whose parts are often word-like. Holophrasis is achieved by a combination of rich inflectional suffixation and by a derivational morphology in which several hundred productive suffixes bearing different lexical and grammatical meanings and functions may be added, recursively, to a lexical base. Each suffix selects the category of its base, over which it normally has scope, and determines the category of the resultant base. This simple but prolific suffixation-based system, termed 'morphological orthodoxy', yields long, polysynthetic words. Three cases are then discussed where suffixal elements govern constructions that in one way or another stretch CAY's orthodox morphology, motivating them by showing parallel constructions governed by elements with similar grammatical and semantic content in languages with more heterodox morphology and syntax.

This paper reviews the definitions and operationalisations of the notion of "polysynthesis" proposed in the typological literature and applies them to Lithuanian (verbal) morphology. It is shown that while Lithuanian falls short of polysynthesis in terms of morphemes-to-words ratio and lacks such features as polypersonalism and incorporation, it still possesses certain properties associated with polysynthesis. These include the so-called lexical affixes (it is argued that Lithuanian verbal prefixes are an example of these) and, to a limited extent, "productive non-inflectional concatenation", i.e. morphemes with a high combinatory potential and compositional meanings, including successively applying verbalisers and nominalisers. These observations not only shed novel light on some well-known facts of Lithuanian grammar, but also further underscore the multifactorial and vague nature of polysynthesis.

This is a preprint for:
Mazzoli, Maria (accepted), Secondary derivation in the Michif verb: Beyond the traditional Algonquian template. In Perez, Danae M. and Eeva Sippola (eds), Postcolonial varieties in the Americas. Berlin/Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Derivation in Algonquian linguistic literature is an ambiguous term that indicating processes related to word formation (Goddard 1990). In Plains Cree, as in the other Algonquian languages, scholars use the terms primary and secondary derivation to describe stem formation, and in a way that does not highlight the substantial difference of the processes involved and do not create a distinction between FINAL morphemes (involved in primary derivation) and derivatives of the stem (involved in secondary derivation) (Wolfart 1973, Pentland 1999, Rhodes 2016, Tollan & Oxford 2018). In this paper, I focus on the difference between primary and secondary derivation in Michif (Bakker 1997, Mazzoli 2019), recognizing that: (1) so-called primary derivation is affixation of categorizing items (FINALS) to lexical roots (INITIALS), it is mostly unavailable to speakers as a conscious process, and non-productive, while (2) so-called secondary derivation is canonical derivation of affixes deriving autonomous stems (Spencer 2015), it is available to speakers and productive. Therefore, I propose for Michif a verb template independent to the ones created for Plains Cree, since it is based on Michif occurrences only. I also provide the complete list of 20 secondary derivatives in Michif, their semantic functions and their linguistic behaviour, based on the analysis of the text of La pchit Sandrieuz (Fleury & Bakker 2004) included with glosses as an Appendix.

Abaza, a polysynthetic ergative Northwest Caucasian language, possesses a typologically unique system of forming content questions by means of inflectional marking in the verb. I offer a detailed description of this peculiar system showing how it is grounded in the more general pattern of encoding relativization by means of prefixes forming part of the basic cross-referencing paradigms. I also discuss a tentative diachronic scenario explaining how at least a subpart of the synthetic interrogative marking in Abaza (and its close relative Abkhaz) could have emerged via univerbation of pseudocleft focus constructions.

Polysynthesis presupposes the existence of 'words', a domain or unit of phonology and syntax that is extremely variable within and across languages: what behaves as a 'word' with respect to one phonological or syntactic rule or constraint may not behave as such with respect to other rules or constraints. Here we develop a system of variables that allows cataloguing all verb-based domains in a language in a bottom-up fashion and then determining any potential convergence of domains in an empirical way. We apply the system to case studies of Mapudungung and Chintang. These confirm earlier observations that polysynthetic languages do not operate with unified units of type 'word' in either phonology or syntax.

This paper discusses a typologically peculiar inverse-like construction found in the polysynthetic ergative Circassian languages of the Northwest-Caucasian family. These languages possess a cislocative verbal prefix, which, in addition to marking the spatial meaning of speaker-orientation, systematically occurs in polyvalent verbs when the object outranks the subject on the person hierarchy. The inverse like use of the cislocative in Circassian differs from the " canonical " direct-inverse system in that, first, it is fully redundant since the person-role linking is achieved by means of the person markers themselves and, second, it does not occur in the basic transitive construction, featuring instead in configurations involving an indirect object both in ditransitive and bivalent intransitive verbs. It is argued that the typologically outstanding properties of the Circassian inverse-like marking can be naturally explained by its diachronic origin.

This paper is devoted to S- and P-argument noun incorporation in a Chukchi variety spoken in Amguema (Far-Eastern Chukotka). The paper is based on my fieldwork in Chukotka as well as on the text corpus collected by other HSE and MSU linguists. Special attention is paid to the constraints on incorporation and the possibility of 'promotion' of another participant to Absolutive position 'vacated' by incorporation.

The audio materials feature recordings of folktales told by Kimi Kimura (1900-1988), an outstanding storyteller in the Saru Dialect of Ainu, (recordings were made in the 1970s to 1980s by Hiroshi Nakagawa) and  also by Ito Oda (1908-2000), one of the last speakers of the Chitose dialect, (recordings were made in 1998-2000 by Anna Bugaeva). The corpus includes stories (prosaic folktales and divine epics), with a total recording time of about 7 hours and a total of  50,000 Ainu words. The audio can be played sentence by sentence, and the entire folktale can be downloaded. The Ainu text transcribed in the Latin alphabet and  katakana, the Japanese translations and English translations can be downloaded in PDF format. The entire text including the Ainu (Latin or katakana transcriptions), Japanese, English and English gloss can be searched. The corpus is intended for the Ainu people who are now in the process of revitalizing their language and culture, to the international community of linguists and cultural anthropologists, and to all people who are interested in the Ainu language and oral literature, which are an integral part of human intellectual heritage.

* This corpus can be viewed with Firefox, Chrome, Safari or IE (Version 8 or higher).
A Glossed Audio Corpus of Ainu Folklore is the first digital version of Ainu Folklore to have Japanese and English translations, a glossary and annotations.

Abaza, a polysynthetic ergative Northwest Caucasian language, shares with its neighbour and distant relative Kabardian a typologically peculiar use of the deictic directional prefixes monitoring the relative ranking of the subject and indirect object on the person hierarchy. In both languages, the cislocative ('hither') prefixes are used if the indirect object outranks the subject on the person hierarchy, and the translocative ('thither') prefixes are used in combinations of first person subjects with second person singular indirect objects. This pattern, reminiscent of the more familiar inverse marking, is observed with ditransitive and bivalent intransitive verbs and is almost fully redundant, since all participants are unequivocally indexed on verbs by pronominal prefixes. I argue that this isogloss, shared by West Circassian (a close relative to Kabardian) but not with Abkhaz, the sister-language of Abaza, is a result of pattern replication under intense language contact , which has led to an increase of both paradigmatic and syntagmatic complexity of Abaza verbal morphology.

The paper deals with the non-trivial morphosyntactic properties of the copula "ra" in the polysynthetic Besleney dialect of Kabardian (East Circassian). Having investigated the morphological status of the copula, which shows behaviour intermediate between a free word and a clitic, its ability to inflect and to combine with a wide variety of syntactic constituents of different types I conclude that the morphological properties of the copula are determined by its syntactic functions, i.e. its role in the encoding of constituent focus.

Polysynthetic languages are mostly head-marking.  But the great majority of polysynthetic languages come from what I will call the Greater Pacific Rim (GPR) population, where the head-marking type is extremely common compared to the rest of the world.  Is head marking a genuine distinctive property of polysynthetic languages, or a conspicuous accident of geography that is equally common in non-polysynthetic languages of the GPR?  This chapter uses a typological survey to answer this question and assess the status of head marking among polysynthetic languages.

This dissertation presents a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the interaction between grammatical structure and prosodic structure in two Australian languages, Dalabon and Kayardild. The typological profiles of these languages contrast dramatically: Dalabon is an extreme head-marking polysynthetic language, in which a single verb can carry all of the information typically associated with a clause in a language like English (e.g. M. Baker, 1996; Evans & Sasse, 2002). Kayardild is an extreme dependent-marking language, with syntactic relationships encoded on nominal dependents through sequences of case morphology (Dench & Evans, 1988; Evans, 1995a; Nordlinger, 1998).
One of the main motivations for studying the interaction between grammatical structure and prosodic constituency in two grammatically distinct languages is that a comparison will potentially test the effects that grammatical structure may have on prosody. By examining two structurally different languages it then becomes possible to test certain hypotheses regarding the grammatical influence on prosodic structure. Whether an extreme dependent-marking language and an extreme head-marking language show similar or different prosodic structural patterns may either support or disprove statements regarding the universality of the interaction between prosodic and grammatical structure.
This dissertation presents both quantitative and qualitative findings, based on approximately 75 minutes of recorded Dalabon and Kayardild narratives. The hypotheses examined in this dissertation concern whether factors such as grammatical complexity, the location of clause boundaries, discourse effects such as the introduction of new information, as well as prosodic length, affect prosodic constituency boundary location and strength, irrespective of the language type in question. Although the two languages differ dramatically in their grammatical structures, the overall interaction between prosody and the various grammatical factors may be expected to show similar patterns. In order to test these hypotheses, the relationships between grammatical complexity and prosodic constituency, between the clause and prosodic constituency, and between prosodic length and prosodic constituency are examined. The results presented here show that there is a large amount of consistency across both languages in terms of the prosodic phrasing of clauses overall, supporting the view that prosodic structure is independent of grammatical structure. However, the results also show there is interesting variation in the prosodic phrasing of constituents within the clause as well as overall pausing patterns, suggesting that typological structure does have a role to play in prosodic structure.

This dissertation develops a theory of lexical accent where the central role is given to the notion of accent competition as the defining property of lexical accent systems. Languages with complex morphology (traditionally known as ‘polysynthetic’) are the empirical basis for this study as they provide a particularly fruitful ground for investigating the effects of both phonological and morphological factors in the assignment of lexical accent. Novel in-depth analyses are developed for Arapaho (Plains Algonquian), Nez Perce (Sahaptian), Ichishkiin Sɨnwit (Sahaptian), and Choguita Rarámuri (Uto-Aztecan). I argue that accent competition across languages is resolved in formally similar ways and that no idiosyncratic, language-specific analyses for individual lexical accent systems are warranted. It is thus proposed that the idiosyncrasy in lexical accent systems is found in the distribution of underlying accents, but not in the rules of the systems. I propose a typology of lexical accent systems and argue that they fall into one of two types based on the mechanism of accent competition resolution: I. Cyclic: In an accent competition, accent in the outermost derivational layer within the domain wins, or II. Directional: In an accent competition, either the right-most or the left-most accent within the domain wins.
The second group of proposals made in this dissertation concerns the status of fundamental properties of stress and prosody – Culminativity and Obligatoriness of stress (Trubezkoy 1939/1960; Hyman 2006, 2009), and primary versus non-primary stress. It has previously been claimed that Culminativity of stress can be breached in highly synthetic languages (e.g. Blackfoot, Stacy 2004; Arapaho, Bogomolets 2014a,b; Mapudungun, Molineaux 2018; Yupik, Woodbury 1987).
I argue that stress is in fact always culminative, but Culminativity should be regarded as a macroparameter allowing for a set of language-specific ways to implement it, including a mechanism of clash avoidance and an enforcement of ‘one and only one’ stress within domains smaller than a morphological word. Finally, this dissertation addresses the general structure of the word-level prosodic system. I propose that the word-level prosodic system is not bipartite: primary stress vs. rhythm, but tripartite: primary stress vs. secondary stress vs. rhythm.

This chapter describes the prosodic structure of verbs in three polysynthetic languages of northern Australia: Bininj Gun-wok, Murrinhpatha and Ngalakgan. Verbs in these languages have mixed grammatical word/phrase characteristics, and prosodic constituency reflects these grammatical properties in interesting ways. In all three languages, phrasal accents are anchored to the edges of prosodic words, and provide the only clear form of prosodic prominence. I take a parsimonious approach to prosodic constituency, preferring the smallest possible number of constituent levels, and assuming no particular constituent level (e.g. metrical feet) to be universal. This results in a relatively sparse prosodic hierarchy for Australian polysynthetic languages, in contrast to the multiple verb-internal levels proposed for some other polysynthetic languages (e.g. Schiering et al. 2010; Uchihara 2018).

The languages of the Panoan linguistic family, located in the Amazon basin on the borders of Brazil, Bolivia and Peru, are considered at least mildly polysynthetic, capable of encoding a large number of categories in their verb complex, which has heretofore been described as word unit. While the high combinatorial potential of the verbal morphemes is partially responsible for the polysynthetic designation of Panoan languages, these morphemes are often described ambiguously with respect to the affix-clitic distinction. This is potentially problematic for the claim that these languages exhibit polysynthesis. The reason for this is that, canonically, clitics are syntactically placed function words (Spencer and Luís 2012), and, thus, should not contribute to the polysynthetic status of a language (Woodbury forthcoming).
In this talk, I compare the verbal morphemes of four Panoan languages (Chácobo, Shipibo-Konibo, Matses, and Kakataibo) on a number of dimensions, considering their affix versus clitic status. I argue that Chácobo’s verbal template, despite superficial similarity to other Panoan languages, is a phrasal, rather than a word, construct. The verbal morphemes in Shipibo-Konibo, Matses, and Kakataibo are plausibly suffixes, and these languages can, therefore, be regarded as morphologically synthetic. In Chácobo, however, analogous morphemes are syntactically placed function words. Interestingly, these function words preferentially cliticize into adjacent prosodic words, creating highly “phonologically synthetic” and even “prosodically holophrastic” structures, that are, at the same time, relatively morphologically analytic. The study suggests interesting implications for comparative Panoan linguistics, and studies of the typology of polysynthesis.

This article describes the syntax and semantics of benefactive and comitative constructions in Dalabon, a Gunwinyguan language of Australia (non-Pama-Nyungan). After having described the respective subcategorisation operations and meanings of each of these constructions, I show that the criterion for using benefactive constructions is the animacy of the benefactive participant, whereas the criterion for using comitative constructions is the semantic role of the argument: the Dalabon comitative marker selects arguments with typical "comitative" meaning (accompaniment and instrument). In addition, I show that the comitative construction has developed a cross-linguistically unusual semantic extension towards the notion of transfer. When combined with verbs of attainment ('get', 'pull', etc.), Dalabon comitative constructions express malefactive transfer (or removal, i.e. the opposite of giving). Comparing Dalabon with neighbouring languages of the same family reveals that this extension is not limited to the Dalabon language, but also occurs in Bininj Gun-wok and Rembarrnga, including with comitative markers that are not cognate with the Dalabon marker. In addition, the Dalabon comitative constructions can also express the transfer of contents of communication with verbs meaning 'tell' or 'ask', an extension that is not attested in Bininj Gun-wok or Rembarrnga.

Previously studied as a series of dialects: Marrithiyel, Marri Tjevin, Marri Amu and (undocumented) Marri Dan. We have now gathered enough data to confirm that, linguistically, these can be treated as one language.
Brinkin has polysynthetic verb morphology, including exuberant use of incorporated body-part nominals. It is unusual among Australian languages in having a fairly extensive stop/fricative contrast.
Brinkin is highly endangered, with only one fluent living speaker that we know of.

This study examines school-based and land-based language materials for Kwakwala (ISO, kwk) developed during a three-year investigation (2016-2019). The materials focussed on three requirements: first, supporting teachers and researchers who are learning the language, second, ensuring that documentation is accurate and conforms to curriculum and guidelines from Elders, and third, integrating Indigenous language and knowledge throughout school activities and revitalization of traditional homelands. I address the above requirements using a Transdisciplinary model to approach the complex multidisciplinary needs of the school and land-based activities. These require Indigenous knowledge and expertise from numerous disciplines. In this study, similar to Mark and Turk (2021), various disciplines (Indigenous and Western-based) are unified through an overarching theory. Situated Learning is the unifying theory to ensure language, social, cultural, and locational contexts are authentic and situated in Indigenous settings. Evidence-based analysis is the over-arching method used to examine the materials. Together, these frame Situated Documentation, a method used in this study to situate community-based documentation in authentic locations. Participatory Action Research integrates the expertise of school staff, researchers, experts, Chiefs and Elders with the researcher.