Presented as part of the ANU Linguistics Seminar Series

Wiru is a Papuan language spoken in the southern highlands of Papua New Guinea, and this seminar presents three typologically unusual features of its grammar. The research emerged out of a Field Methods class taught at ANU, and this is a practice run for upcoming presentations at ALS—so come support our students!

Nominalising enclitics in Wiru (Rebecca Dixon)

This talk will discuss several nominalising enclitics found in Wiru. Interestingly, these versatile morphemes attach to a number of word classes and each carry different senses, including time, speech, and actions.

The general noun-modifying clause construction in Wiru (Caroline Hendy)

Wiru uses the same construction for relative clauses as it does to express extended semantic relations between the head noun and modifying clause. Prepare for a whirlwind of dropped head nouns, semantic matrix-verb agreement, and co-referential nouns internal and external to the modifying clause.

The switch-reference system in Wiru and its functions (Yihan Chen)

This talk presents the Wiru switch-reference system, a type of anaphoric linkage across clause boundaries that is marked by distinctive verbal morphology. Besides tracking subject reference, the system also tracks the agentivity value across clauses.