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| Jiwarli Grammar |
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Welcome to the Jiwarli grammar page! Jiwarli is a Pama-Nyungan language, which means it uses suffixes to express shades of meaning, and reveal who does what to whom. Non Pama-Nyungan languages also use prefixes to express grammatical functions. Because Jiwarli uses suffixes for this purpose, it does not need to use word order to express who does what in a sentence (this is known as 'grammatical relations').
Where we have shown you examples from the Jiwarli language, you will notice we have shown them in groups of three lines. In these examples, the first line, in red, is the sentence in Jiwarli. The second, in black, is what linguists call a ‘gloss’, breaking the words in the sentence into linguistic components and providing a ‘bridge’ to the next line (in green), which is the equivalent sentence in English.
You can investigate the contents of Jiwarli grammar by visiting various sections of this site. If you are not very familiar with concepts of grammar, we recommend you visit the section on case and ergativity first of all. Otherwise, you can move straight on to find out about noun endings, or verbs in Jiwarli, or pragmatic and grammatical considerations in referent ellipsis in Jiwarli. We hope you enjoy learning about Jiwarli grammar!
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