7 - Suffixes on nouns

Summary

For lots of the meanings that English conveys by way of prepositions like to, from, over, under, after and so on, Barngarla uses suffixes. Schürmann provides us with a number of important shapes that are suffixed to nouns, to make meanings for which English uses prepositions.

Markedness

Across Australia a suffix -nya or -nha is widely used to mark something as being in some way different or special. The Thura-Yura languages are the same; the suffix -nha has a wide range of uses here, too. Luise Hercus describes this suffix in Kuyani as:

[a] nominal clitic with multiple functions: it can be a proper noun marker and is therefore common in placenames … it is used to ‘single out’ or particularise adjectives and is especially common in possessive adjectives … sometimes also affixed to adverbs … sometimes it is just emphatic. (Hercus 2006a)

This suffix is ubiquitous as well in Adnyamathanha, so much so that Tunstill (2004: 434) can say of it only that it is ‘of uncertain/variable meaning’, and Schebeck (1974: 4) says that it is ‘doubtlessly the most difficult to define’. Because of the ubiquity of this suffix in all Thura-Yura languages, where Schürmann has an ending -nna or -na, and where I am unable to find a context for such an ending in another language, I will cautiously and rather reluctantly assume that this shape could be phonemic -nha, and proceed as if it were.

Plural & dual

In Australia as elsewhere, it is frequently the case that only human nouns, or nouns that refer to highly animate things, may take marking for non-singular number (dual or plural): usually men, women, dogs and/or children. Schürmann has the following, repeated here with suggested phonemic representations:

Both Adnyamathanha and Kuyani show two forms of the dual-marking suffix, -alypila and -alpila (Hercus 2006, Tunstill 2004: 428). Schürmann spells the Barngarla equivalent -lbelli, without indication of fronting and raising of a preceding vowel: so, yurralbelli and pallalbelli, not ^xyurrailbelli or ^xpallailbelli. This makes the shape of the Barngarla suffix as -lbili certain. Schürmann says that this suffix is an abbreviation of the number kalbelli ‘two’, which is phonemic galbili. Nhukunu has paarla ‘woman’ (Hercus 1992: 26), and I will presume that the rhotic in the Barngarla word copies the place of articulation (retroflex) of the preceding lateral consonant.