Dyirbal Language - Grammar

Grammar

The language is best known for its system of noun classes, numbering four in total. They tend to be divided among the following semantic lines:

• I - most animate objects, men
• II - women, water, fire, violence, and exceptional animals
• III - edible fruit and vegetables
• IV - miscellaneous (includes things not classifiable in the first three)

The class usually labelled "feminine" (II) inspired the title of George Lakoff's book Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. Some linguists distinguish between such systems of classification and the gendered division of items into the categories of "feminine", "masculine" and (sometimes) "neuter" that is found in, for example, many Indo-European languages.

Dyirbal shows a split-ergative system. Sentences with a first or second person pronoun have their verb arguments marked for case in a pattern that mimics nominative–accusative languages. That is, the first or second person pronoun appears in the least marked case when it is the subject (regardless of the transitivity of the verb), and in the most marked case when it is the direct object. Thus Dyirbal is morphologically accusative in the first and second persons, but morphologically ergative elsewhere; and it is still always syntactically ergative.