The semantics of the dyirbal avoidance style: Adjectives

Alongside the everyday speech style, Dyirbal had an avoidance style called Jalnguy, which had to be used in the presence of relatives with whom direct contact should be avoided. The two styles had identical grammar, phonology, and phonetics, but every lexeme was different. Jalnguy was pitched at a more general level so that, in many cases, several lexemes in the everyday style would be grouped under one term in Jalnguy. For example, six varieties of oak tree would each have its own name in the everyday style, but fell together under one Jalnguy term. Examination of the Jalnguy correspondences given for adjectives shows that the Jalnguy lexicon is less rich and less well-developed when dealing with adjectives than with verbs and nouns. There are, of course, Jalnguy correspondents Ev adjectives expressing the most common qualities, found across languages world-wide. There are a number of many-to-one everyday-to-Jalnguy correspondences, which can be semantically revealing. Speakers provided sentential definitions for some adjectives (in terms of verbs), often quite ingenious. But for many everyday style adjectives referring to rather recondite qualities, my consultants could offer no appropriate Jalnguy term. What they did instead was provide an evaluative judgment, most often 'not good', sometimes 'good' (or occasionally a dimensional description, 'big' or 'little'). The principle of not using any everyday style words in Jalnguy discourse was thus maintained by commenting on the worth of a quality, rather that specifying what the quality is.