Chapter Four - nouns and noun classes

Summary

This chapter is concerned with nouns as word-forms that refer to types of things, while Chapter Six deals with nominal expressions as denoting instances of those types (cf Langacker 1991:51). Worrorra referring expressions may be described by reference to at least three independent parameters with formal consequences:

Classificatory: by way of a five-way gender partition

Lexical: by way of a four-way morpholexical division

Animacy: by way of a two-way split, pluralizable vs non-pluralizable

Classificatory

Worrorra nouns occur as members of one of five classes or genders. These are a masculine class, a feminine class, a celestial class, a terrestrial class, and a minor class of collective nouns containing probably about a dozen members. Although some genders may be neutralized in some situations (see especially Chapter Nine), genders and noun classes do not constitute separate categories in Worrorra, as they do in some languages such as Mayali (Evans 2003), so that the terms ‘gender’ and ‘noun class’ may be used here synonymously. The two non-human genders referred to here and in Clendon (1999) as celestial and terrestrial, are referred to by Love (1934) as the wuna and mana classes respectively. Love named these genders after the definite articles used with their members (wunu and mana in my experience) (see Chapter Seven). Gender-marking is exhaustive and unique; the gender of the head of a noun phrase controls agreement on adjectives, inalienable nouns, pronouns and verbs and is essentially invariable with respect to each noun. Gender in Worrorra is described in §4.1.