This presentation represents the culmination of my research as a Summer Scholar at the Australian National University, a program I undertook in the summer of ‘23-24. The project, supervised by Francesca Merlan, involved semantic analysis of the complex verb system in Wardaman, an Australian language spoken in Katherine by two elderly people (at the time of writing). Wardaman is unusual amongst Australian complex verb languages, in that it has a rather large inventory of finite verbs, though not all of which can be complexified using coverbs. My research aimed to determine why some verbs have combinatory freedom while others do not, and therefore what this reflects about the organisation of Wardaman’s verbal system in the Australian context.
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