Felicity Meakins was awarded the Kenneth L. Hale Award 2021by the Linguistic Society of America
(LSA) for outstanding work on the documentation of endangered languages Gurindji is a
Pama-Nyungan language of north-central Australia. It is a member of the Ngumpin subgroup which
forms a part of the Ngumpin-Yapa group. The phonology is typically Pama-Nyungan the phoneme
inventory contains five places of articulation for stops which have corresponding nasals. It
also has three laterals two rhotics and three vowels. There are no fricatives and among the
stops voicing is not phonemically distinctive. One striking morpho-phonological process is a
nasal cluster dissimilation (NCD) rule. Gurindji is morphologically agglutinative and suffixing
exhibiting a mix of dependent-marking and head-marking. Nominals pattern according to an
ergative system and bound pronouns show an accusative pattern. Gurindji marks a further 10
cases. Free and bound pronouns distinguish person (1st inclusive and exclusive 2nd and 3rd)
and three numbers (minimal unit augmented and augmented). The Gurindji verb complex consists
of an inflecting verb and coverb. Inflecting verbs belong to a closed class of 34 verbs which
are grammatically obligatory. Coverbs form an open class numbering in the hundreds and
carrying the semantic weight of the complex verb
