When speaking English, we rely on the word order of a sentence to indicate which nouns are the subject and object of the verb. For example, in John kicked Sally, we know that John is the person doing the kicking, and if we change the word order, eg. Sally kicked John, now Sally is the kicker. However if we look at the following two sentences from the glosses of the Traditional Mythology Text, we can see that although they express similar meanings (ie. that (‘they’) were injured with a weapon), the word order is different — in 27 the verb is last, but in 31 the verb is first. (The red lines are the Jiwarli sentence, the black lines are a direct translation of each Jiwarli word, and the green lines are the english equivalents of what each Jiwarli sentence actually means).

So how does Jiwarli express who is doing what if word order is not important? The answer lies in case marking. Case marking involves attaching an affix to the root (or ‘basic’ part) of a noun to indicate the role that noun plays in a sentence. The most important, or core grammatical case markers of a language are those that mark the subject of an intransitive verb (IS), the subject (or agent) of a transitive verb (TS) and the object (or patient) of a transitive verb (TO). There are also other case markers such as dative (which can mark a variety of roles, such as the indirect object), locative (which indicates that the noun it marks is where the action described in the sentence occurs), instrumental (which marks a noun that acts as the instrument used to perform the action described by the verb) and various others. Therefore, in Jiwarli, word order is not important because case marking is used on nouns to indicate their role in the sentence.

When we say that Jiwarli is an split ergative language, we are referring to the manner in which Jiwarli groups the core grammatical roles of IS, TS and TO. If we look at English pronouns, we can see that English groups IS and TS together (because the same pronoun is used for both roles) and treats TO differently. Eg:

English pronouns can be described as nominative-accusative, or simply nominative, because IS/TS have the same case (nominative), and TO is different (accusative). However, many Australian Aboriginal languages have ergative-absolutive, or simply ergative case marking, which means that they groups IS and TO together and treat TS differently. We can see in the Jiwarli sentence below that wuru ‘tree’ has the same form in its role as IS and as TO: Eg:

In fact, like many Australian Aborignal languages, Jiwarli uses a mixture of nominative and ergative case marking - it is a split ergative system. Jiwarli first person singular pronouns are nominative, the other pronouns and animate nouns are tripartite (where IS and TS and TO all have different case markers) and the inanimate nouns and demonstratives are ergative. These three patterns of case marking are shown in the table below.

However, having just explained that Jiwarli relies on case marking to indicate the role of each noun, it is obvious in the glosses of the Jiwarli text (which give a morpheme by morpheme analysis of each word) that in many sentences, the nouns are not even present, as in the examples below. (A word enclosed in parentheses in the English translation indicates that that word is not actually present, but merely understood in the Jiwarli sentence).

In sentence 25, the words for ‘they’ and ‘him’ are not physically present in the Jiwarli sentence - the sentence consists solely of the verb ‘kill.’ So if a sentence consists of only a verb, how is it understood who killed who? You can learn more about this dropping, or ellipsis of nouns by looking at the phenomenon of zero anaphora.

In addition, in sentence 32 above we can see that both purrarti ‘woman’ and wana ‘yamstick’ are marked by the ergative suffix, and the ergative suffix has different forms on these two words. To find out why this happens, take a more detailed look at Jiwarli nominal declensions.

And finally, you may have noticed that the verbs of Jiwarli also have suffixes - there are a few examples of a ‘past’ suffix above. To find out how Jiwarli expresses tense, aspect and mood etc, see the section on verb morphology.