Phraseology and Culture in English

4. Processes involving multiword units in the noun phrase in 
Aboriginal English 
Comment will be made here on four kinds of processes which involve the 
distinctive use of multiword units in the noun phrase in the data which have 
been examined: compounding, suffixation, collocation and syntactic adjust-
ment. In most cases it will be apparent that it is not the processes them-
selves which are innovative, but the elements to which they have been ap-
plied.
1. Compounding 
a) 
Noun + Noun Compounding 
The most frequent form of compounding in the noun phrase in Aboriginal 
English, as in Standard English, is noun-centred (Bauer and Huddleston 
2002: 1646). The data yielded six kinds of noun-centred compounding: 
Hyponymic
This is the default form, in which the first noun is a hyponym of the sec-
ond, as in: 
foot track ‘track for walking, as opposed to driving;’ also, ‘footprint’ 
finger ring ‘ring worn on the finger’ 
ink pen ‘pen, for writing’ 
cold sick ‘a cold’ 
cattle snake ‘snake with markings like those on cattle’ 
law man ‘a person very knowledgeable in the law’ (Arthur 1996: 42) 
roo dog ‘a skilled hunter’ (metaphor) 

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Multiword units in Aboriginal English
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featherfoot (tjina karpil, ‘foot bound’, in Pitjantjatjara), ‘an avenger who 
has feathers bound to his feet to cover his tracks’. 
Three slightly distinctive cases are eye glasses ‘spectacles’, which is com-
mon to Kriol and probably also to an earlier dialect of British English; 
dinner time (as in He had a dinner time), which is a conversion of the 
Aboriginal English adverb compound dinner time, and bunji-man, ‘a white 
man with a predilection for Aboriginal women’ (Moore 1999), which is 
probably a hybrid, drawing on the same Aboriginal language or creole 
source as the Aboriginal English expression bunjyin around ‘flaunting 
one’s body.’