Research Paper On Wangkajunga

Wangkajunga is a member of a large Pama-Nyungan family that belongs to the northwestern Wati Subgroup of the Western Desert language in Australia.
Pama-Nyungan family was identified coined by O’Grady, Wurm and Hale along with a non-Pama-Nyungan family (Blake 1987). Wati Subgroup includes neighboring to and closely related to Wangkajunga Yulparija, Manyjilyjarra, and Kukatja languages (Capell 1962; O’Grady, Voegelin and Voegelin 1996; Wurm 1972; Oates and Oates 1970).
O’Grady, Voegelin and Voegelin (1996:138) referred to the Western Desert language as a family-like language that stretches across a vast territory: the language extends from southeast to northwest for a distance of 900 miles. Given this broad territory where Western Desert is
spoken and some overt differences among its dialects, another researcher, Capell (1972), suggested an idea of subdividing the Western Desert language into much smaller groups according to the specifics of the separate dialects. Thus, the name of the “Affix-transferring languages” was given to the northwestern languages of the Western Desert. “Affix-transferring languages” prescribe the transferring of person markers to the head-word of the utterance, rather than to the verb, where ‘they logically belong’ (Capell 1972:5).
Wangkajunga language possesses a complex system of pronominal clitics that sets the northwestern languages of the Western Desert group apart from the southern Western Desert languages such as Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara.
This clitic system is not the only property that distinguishes the northwestern languages of Wangkajunga, Kartujarra, Yulparija, Manyjilyjarra, and Kukatja from the southwestern languages. Jones (2011:12) has pointed out that an extremely free word order, minor role of nominalisations in the formation of subordinate clauses, the cross-referencing pronouns compulsory for all participants, and some other features of the northern Western Desert Australian languages set them apart from those in the
south.
Blake (1977:9) points out that very few languages in Australia have free pronouns operating in an Ergative paradigm. Wangkajunga language has an Ergative-Absolutive system on all common nouns and on all subclasses of nominals including free pronouns. Moreover, the languages of the northern Western Desert, Wangkajunga included, are the minority of Australian languages in which instrumental function is expressed by the locative case. In many other languages it is expressed by a comitative suffix or an Ergative case marker (Goddard 1985:41).
Interesting to note, that Wangkajunga’s case system specifics is not one of the grounds on which this language can be identified as belonging to the Pama-Nyungan family.
Kenneth L. Hale’s work (1976) on the classification of Native Australian languages demonstrates that the Pama-Nyungan languages show shared suppletion of the Ergative (-lu ̴ ngku) and the Locative (-la ̴ ngka) suffixes. However, as described in the Jones’ ‘Grammar of Wangkajunga’(2011), Ergative case in this language has –lu,-ju, and –tu allomorphs and Locative case has –ngka,-ta, and –ja allomorphs. Despite this discrepancy on suppletion, Wangkajunga does belong to the Pama-Nyungan family on the basis of it being a suffixing language, which lack grammatical gender.
Another difference between Wangkajunga and the languages of southern Western Desert is that it does not have a different case marking for proper nouns and independent pronouns and marks both with an Ergative case suffix –lu, unlike its southern neighbors.
When working on her Grammar of Wangkajunga Jones (2011) found out that speakers of Wangkajunga, Yulparija, Manyjilyjarra, and Kukatja refer to themselves as speakers of one language and use names of the languages interchangeably. Indeed, thanks to his field work on Wangajunga grammar researcher adduces a grammatical evidence for the fact that Wangkajunga is a name to cover more than one
dialect.