The Western Desert Code: an Australian Cryptogrammar
David Rose
PhD Thesis, University of Sydney, 1998
This thesis looks at resources for meaning in the language of the indigenous Anangu people of Australia’s Western Desert, with particular focus on the dialect Pitjantjatjara. Western Desert is spoken from the Kimberley region of northern Western Australia (WA), to the Great Victoria Desert of South Australia (SA). Although features of Western Desert dialects have been described in several previous accounts, the approach I have taken here represents a significant departure from the mainstream of descriptive linguistics in Australia, as it employs the theoretical and descriptive tools of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) to explore the language as a resource for making meaning in its diverse social contexts. Previous Australianist descriptions have taken account of semantic functions to a lesser or greater degree (eg Heath 1984, Rumsey 1990 and McGregor 1992, who have been influenced by SFL insights), but they are generally constrained within a traditional rule-based descriptive framework consisting of segmental phonemics, morphologically defined word classes and syntax of ‘phrases’ and ‘sentences’. In contrast to the formalist tradition, the survey here is organised in terms of general domains of meaning - textual, interpersonal, experiential and logical, and the starting point for each section is with texts in social contexts rather than with decontextualised structural units. Because of its orientation to social context, the survey as whole begins with a discussion of Western Desert culture, exemplified with linguistic features that typify relations between the language and its culture in each semantic region.
In the survey, I have attempted to draw a broad outline of the socio-semantic code of Western Desert culture, from the perspective of the grammatical patterns through which it is manifested as social discourse. I am interpreting socio-semantic code here both as an elaborate network of potential meanings that members can draw on in the social semiotic construction of their culture, and as the elaborate patterns of meaning they construct in doing so. In other words, the code consists not simply in the semantic resources of the language, but involves equally the varying cultural contexts in which its resources are employed, and the varying socio-semantic orientations that members bring to these contexts. Halliday (1994a: xxxi) suggests a definition of code, broadly in terms of its contexts of culture, its manifestation as texts, and its acquisition by learners, and concludes that “Only the grammatical system as a whole represents the semantic code of a language. To understand the code, we need an overview of the grammatical system; both in order to confront one part of it with another, and in order to interpret texts construed in the code”.
The survey attempts to fulfil both the latter requirements for representing and understanding the Western Desert code. Firstly, it aims to give an overview of the grammatical system as a whole, as well as its cultural contexts and the texts that construe them, so that the various elements of the code can be systematically interpreted and related to each other. Secondly, it aims to provide a useful reference grammar for interpreting texts in Australian languages from the perspective of their semantic systems. It is hoped that such a reference will help to inform comparative understandings of ways of meaning in each culture, particularly within educational and social science discourses of the colonising culture, that will have practical outcomes for the education of indigenous children as well as for theories of sociality. Finally, it aims to provide an elaborate and socially useful analytical model that builds on the insights provided by both ethnological and linguistic descriptions of indigenous Australian cultures to date.