“Lacking” in Australian languages: A survey of the nominal privative
Grace Ephraums
October 2021 

Two widely recognised grammatical categories in Australianist linguistics are the proprietive (denoting that an entity is present) and the privative (denoting that an entity is absent). The privative has been the subject of far less cross-linguistic study, meaning that there is little established understanding of how it behaves across languages. This thesis aims to partially fill this gap by presenting a survey of the nominal privative across a sample of 62 Australian languages. This survey examines several core morphosyntactic and semantic elements of the privative. Firstly, the commonality of privative markers across this sample is recorded, before a more detailed examination of the morphosyntax of these markers. This consists of a survey of their morphological types (suffixes, enclitics, particles, postpositions and independent forms), and the domain marking positions of these markers. This is followed by a taxonomy of entities that can be privative-marked, demonstrating the semantic range of the category. This thesis also aims to flag several areas in need of further study. These will yield a better understanding of the behaviour of the privative itself, and how it fits into the broader field of Australian negation.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/006678 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Monash University, Australia
keywords:	australian languages, privative, negation, typology, nominal morphology, semantics, morphology, syntax
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