Morphophonemics

The forms of liaison which apply in StE are not always carried over into Aboriginal English. Thus /ðə/ ‘the’ does not become /ði/ before a vowel. Nor does /ə/ ‘a’ become /æn/ ‘an’. The contractions which are common in StE, such as I’ll, we’re, are not as common in Aboriginal English, partly because of the less frequent use of auxiliaries. However, the /ð/ of the may be assimilated to the preceding consonant (Sharpe 1977) and the preverbal tense marker bin may be contracted to ‘n, as in They’n see it (Dwyer 1974: 19). Initial /w/ may be lost in words in both stressed and unstressed positions, as in /aɪΛs/ ‘I was’ (Readdy 1961: 94) and I na wear it on ‘I want to wear it’ (Dwyer 1974: 19). Aboriginal English speakers, unlike Australian English speakers, do not always neutralize the vowels in function words such as at, from and to when they are unstressed.