Goddard, Cliff (1992). Traditional Yankunytjatjara ways of speaking – A semantic perspective. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 12(1), 93-122. DOI: 10.1080/07268609208599472
Yankunytjatjara is a minority dialect of the Western Desert Language, spoken by several hundred people, primarily in the north-west of South Australia. This paper sets out to describe some of the dimensions of communicative competence in the traditional Yankunytjatjara lifestyle. Part One gives a brief outline of the walytja ‘kin, relationship’ system, essential social background for what follows. Parts Two and Three consider, respectively, the elaborately oblique speech style tjalpawangkanyi, and various kinds of boisterous banter and joking, concentrating on characterizing the linguistic devices and rhetorical strategies of these speech styles. In discussion sections at the end of Parts Two and Three, Anna Wierzbicka’s semantically inspired approach to cross-cultural pragmatics is applied to the data.
Note: The tag below identifies the rules for use of the speech styles explicated in this paper as cultural scripts, a term that was not yet current in the NSM framework at the time.
Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners
