Body-parts in Dalabon and Barunga Kriol: Matches and mismatches

Maïa Ponsonnet (1, 2)

1 SCHL - School of Culture History and Language
2 CREDO - Centre de Recherche et de Documentation sur l'Océanie

This article describes a number of body-part lexemes in Dalabon, a non-Pama-Nyungan language of the Gunwinyguan family (Australia), and their counterparts in Barunga Kriol, the local creole. The aim of this paper is a comparison between some aspects of the Dalabon body-part lexicon and their counterparts in Barunga Kriol. Throughout the study of Dalabon and Barunga Kriol lexemes denoting the hand (or front paw) and its digits, the foot (or back paw) and its digits, the face, the nose and the nostrils, and finally, the head and the crown of the head, it is found that Barunga Kriol replicates some of the lexical structures of the local Aboriginal languages, but not all of them. In particular, a remarkable specificity of Dalabon, the fact that the head and the face are not labelled as such, and are preferably described as an assemblage of features, is only partially replicated in Barunga Kriol. The paper seeks to identify some of the factors explaining the matches and mismatches between Barunga Kriol and Dalabon.

Mots clés: substrate influence; creole development; Barunga Kriol; Dalabon; body-parts

Domaines: Linguistique; Anthropologie sociale et ethnologie

Maïa Ponsonnet. Body-parts in Dalabon and Barunga Kriol: Matches and mismatches. 42nd Australian Linguistic Society Conference - 2011. (Canberra, 1-4 Dec 2011), Dec 2011, Canberra, Australia. pp.351-387. ⟨halshs-00750636⟩