A description of the Emmi language of the Northern Territory of Australia

About this book

Emmi, named after the word for 'what' in the language, is a highly endangered polysynthetic Australian language with only a handful of fluent speakers. A member of the Daly River sprachbund of the Northern Territory, Emmi is a head-marking language with vestigial noun class marking, but a highly developed system of verb classifiers and ordered nominal and propositional enclitics. Emmi noun incorporation is lexical and syntactic, and, as in other languages of the region, lexically incorporated body-parts function as metaphors and classifiers for entitties of similar shape to these body-parts. The syntax of Emmi simple and complex clauses involves serial constructions in which major intransitive verbs have been poly-grammaticised to provide aspectual information.