A Linguistic Description of Lockhart River Creole

Abstract

Lockhart River Creole (LRC) is an English-based contact variety spoken in the Lockhart River Aboriginal Community located on Cape York Peninsula approximately 780km north of Cairns. Considering that LRC has not been previously studied, analysed, and described, the focus of the present study is to provide its linguistic description, design an orthographical system allowing for the language to be used in the written form, ascertain if LRC is a creole or a variety of Aboriginal English, establish similarities and differences between LRC and other contact varieties spoken in the Pacific basin, and determine the scope of the influence of the two substrate languages, namely, Kuuku Ya’u and Umpila. While Chapter 1 provides information on the Lockhart River area and its linguistic configuration, theoretical background, language data and methodology, as well as sources consulted for the purpose of the present project, Chapter 2 constitutes a detailed description of historical factors that contributed to the emergence and development of LRC. Chapter 3 examines segmental phonemes of LRC, namely, consonants, vowels, and diphthongs, as well as variation and phonotactics, i.e. syllable structure, in addition to such suprasegmental features as vowel length, stress, and intonation. Furthermore, Chapter 3 also discusses the proposed phonemically-based orthographical system. In addition to morphological processes, Chapter 4 explores the LRC word classes, namely, nouns, pronouns, determiners, quantifiers, adjectives, prepositions, verbs, adverbs, conjunctions, and interjections. Chapter 5 discusses the noun phrase, including both simple and complex NPs, as well as pronominal NPs, and prepositional phrases. This is followed by the presentation of the word and phrase coordination. In addition to the coordination of verbs and verb phrases, Chapter 6 investigates the verb phrase, including bare, intransitive, transitive, ditransitive, and complex head verbs. This is then followed by the examination of oblique complements, serial verb constructions, prepositional phrases and adverbs within the verb phrase. Chapter 7, which is devoted to simple sentences, provides an overview of the five types of predicates, the predicate constituents, sentences with and without the subject, as well as declarative sentences, including negative markers, and interrogative sentences, both 'yes-no' and information questions. Chapter 8 presents complex sentences and discusses complement and adverbial clauses, relative clauses, left dislocation, as well as the coordination and subordination of complex sentences. Chapter 9 examines the LRC vocabulary, as well as emphatic and discourse markers. Concluding remarks are provided in Chapter 10. Each chapter contains original and substantial information pertinent to the linguistic description of LRC. Furthermore, numerous comparisons of many LRC features with their equivalents in other contact varieties, namely, Australian Kriol, Torres Strait Creole, Solomon Islands Pijin, Vanuatu Bislama, and Papua New Guinea Tok Pisin, are provided throughout this thesis.