The variable expression of possession in Alyawarr children’s language repertoires

As this chapter appears in a Festschrift for my cherished former PhD supervisor Professor Jane Simpson, I have drawn inspiration from our shared interest in the language practices of Australian Indigenous youth, with particular focus in children whose repertoires contain a new contact language. In this study, I have taken specific inspiration from a study that Jane conducted with Samantha Disbray (Disbray and Simpson 2005), which examined the expression of possession in Wumpurrarni English, a contact variety spoken in Tennant Creek, Northern Territory (NT).

The study of possession in new Australian languages has revealed interesting insights about a number of aspects of language use in Indigenous Australia today (further below). In the Disbray and Simpson (2005) study, the authors were able to demonstrate that possession in the new variety was the result of complex interaction from the source languages, resulting in old forms with new functional and distributional loads. For example, Wumpurrarni English speakers make use of a possessor clitic from the source language Warumungu, but use it in a way that more closely reflects the syntactic behaviour of the Australian English genitive clitic (another source language). In a similar vein, several other studies of possession in new Australian languages (outlined below) have focused on possession primarily as a way of exploring the formal outcomes of language contact.