Abstracts Language, Literature, and Linguistic

Topics in a spatial grammar of Kukatja

by THOMAS BLAKE ENNEVER

This thesis explores the ways in which speakers of Kukatja (an Australian Aboriginal language spoken in Balgo, WA) think and talk about space. It finds that speakers across generations have a diverse linguistic repertoire for encoding spatial meanings but most prefer to encode spatial meanings in a way that invokes aspects of the wider environment (e.g., expressions of the kind 'north of the tree' or 'on the pool-side of the house') rather than using perspective-based terms like 'left' and 'right' familiar to English speakers. Evidence from the examination of pointing and other spatial gestures suggests that these linguistic resources have a role in shaping how Kukatja speakers encode and retrieve spatial concepts in memory.