This thesis provides an overview of the verbal morphology of Wartha Thuntai, a Tonda language of Southern New Guinea.  Verbs in Thuntai are the most complex of the word classes, inflecting for seven of the nine categories identified by Bybee (1985): tense, aspect, mood, agreement with subject for person and number, voice and object agreement. Thuntai verbs also inflect for two additional categories, gender agreement and spatial deixis.

There are a number of different theoretical approaches to morphology and in order to adequately describe the composition of verbs in Thuntai I examine the adequacy of four types of morphological models using the terminology presented by Stump (2001): lexical-incremental, lexical-realisational, inferential-incremental and inferential-realisational.  As a result of this analysis, I use an inferential-realisational model, Network Morphology (Brown and Hippisley, 2012), to develop a morphological analysis of Thuntai verbs. The analysis is based on data I collected during a 2012 fieldtrip to Wando Village, Papua New Guinea.

 

Brown, D., & Hippisley, A. (2012). Network Morphology: a defaults-based theory of word structure. Cambridge: Cambrige University Press.

Bybee, J. (1985). Morphology. A study of the relation between meaning and form. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Stump, G. (2001). Inflectional Morphology: A theory of Paradigm Structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.