LING 1020 Lecture Notes - Lecture 21: Preposition And Postposition, Rotokas Language, Angle Of View
Document Summary
Ling1020 lecture 21: languages of australia & papua new guinea. Languages reached new guinea & australia no later than 40,000 years ago: sea level was lower, new guinea & tasmania were connected to australia. 8,000 years ago sea levels rose & contact with outside groups cut off. 212 living languages: 141 dying, 178 extinct. 2 groups of languages: pama-nyungan, non-pama-nyungan. There are hundreds of languages, the majority of which are undocumented. Language death- many languages have few speakers (they"re undergoing language contraction) Languages have been in contact for too long likely to have shared features. Split case system a case system that changes alignment depending on grammatical context: examples of grammatical context. Non-configurational word order phase structure (e. g. whether an adjective occurs before or after the noun, or whether the preposition occurs before or after the noun) is non-rigid, allowing for free word order. Nouns have ergative-absolutive alignment and take suffixed case markets.
