"Wagiman online dictionary -- Links and references"

Links & references

[Links | Books and articles on Wagiman | Books on Australian Aboriginal languages]

Links

Australian Aboriginal web resources

The World Wide Web Virtual Library: Aboriginal Languages of Australia The best resource of its kind on the web, containing a comprehensive set of links to Australian Aboriginal language resources on the web.

AIATSIS - Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Australia’s premier institution for research on the cultures and lifestyles of Australian Aborignal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Lots of links; see especially ASEDA - the Aboriginal Studies Electronic Data Archive.

ATSI WWW Resource Directory This site attempts to maintain links to all web sites for or about Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

Other online dictionaries of Australian Aboriginal languages

Uw Oykangand and Uw Olkola Multimedia Dictionary Features lots of interesting cultural information and colour photographs.

Kamilaroi/Gamilaraay Dictionary A comprehensive dictionary of this language of northern New South Wales.

Pages with links to online dictionaries of languages from all over the world

yourDictionary.com Links to more than 1500 dictionaries in 230 different languages.

Language Dictionaries and Translators Another site with links to many online dictionaries.

Books and articles on Wagiman

Cook, A. R. 1986. Mood, tense, aspect and scope in Wakiman. Language in Aboriginal Australia 1: 39-48.

Cook, A. R. 1987. Wagiman Matyin: a description of the Wagiman language of the Northern Territory. Ph.D. dissertation, La Trobe University, Melbourne.

Cook, A. R. 1988. Participle sentences in Wakiman. In Austin, P. (Ed.), Complex sentence constructions in Australian languages, 69-95. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Tryon, D. T. 1971. The Wageman language. In Papers on the languages of the Australian Aboriginals, Australian Aboriginal Studies No. 38, Linguistic series No. 16, 1-11. Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies.

Wilson, S. (Ed.) 1998. Wakgala mahan matjjin Wagiman: Stories in the Wagiman language of Australia’s Northern Territory. Katherine: Diwurruwurru-jaru Aboriginal Corporation.

Wilson, S. 1999. Coverbs and Complex Predicates in Wagiman. Stanford: CSLI Publications.

Cover of "Coverbs and Complex Predicates in Wagiman"

Abstract: Wagiman is an Australian Aboriginal language spoken in the Top End of the Northern Territory. It possesses an unusual open class of words which are here termed “coverbs”. Most frequently, coverbs are paired with an inflecting verb from a closed class to form a complex predicate: the coverb and inflecting verb jointly determine the verbal semantics and argument structure of the clause. This book provides a descriptive and analytical account of the behaviour of coverbs in Wagiman, especially their role in complex predicate formation. The aim is to discover what principles are at work in directing and constraining this process, and how the meaning of the whole is derived from the meanings of the parts. After discussing a wide range of relevant data from the language, a formal analysis is outlined within Lexical Functional Grammar. It is argued that to account for the intricacy of Wagiman complex predicates, it is necessary for the grammar to make explicit reference to representations of lexical meaning, and it is proposed that complex predicate formation can be seen as the fusion of these semantic representations.

This book is available from Amazon.com.

Books on Australian Aboriginal languages

The following books provide excellent general introductions to Australian Aboriginal languages:

Blake, B. 1991. Australian Aboriginal languages: a general introduction. 2nd edn. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press.

Dixon, R. M. W. 1980. The languages of Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Walsh, M. and Yallop, C. 1993. (Eds.) Language and culture in Aboriginal Australia. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press.