The 43nd Australian Linguistic Society Conference Proceedings – 2013 edited by xxxxxxx, unimelb digital repository Text and meter in a Lander Warlpiri song series ∗ Myfany Turpin and Mary Laughren The University of Queensland myfturpin@uq.edu.au m.laughren@uq.edu.au [submitted Nov 2013 to the Australian Linguistics Society 2013 conference proceedings] Abstract. The way that language and music are matched to create a well-formed song differs across singing genres and languages. This article analyses how text and music align in a set of Warlpiri women’s songs of the yawulyu genre from the Lander River region of central Australia. It proceeds by investigating whether a previously identified set of constraints governing how words are put to music in a different corpus of yawulyu songs applies to a further set of yawulyu songs considered here, which we refer to here as the Kiirnpa song series. Both sets of songs are from the Lander Warlpiri region. It emerges that one constraint must be revised, and an additional constraint is observed in this corpus, while the preferred weighting of constraints differs in interesting ways. Keywords: Warlpiri songs, text, meter, prosody, rhythm, yawulyu * We thank the Kiirnpa singers and the many Warlpiri women from Willowra for sharing their songs and traditional knowledge. We also thank Helen Morton for assistance in transcription, our funders, the Natural Resource Management Board (NT), under the auspices of the Central Land Council (2010) and two Australian Research Council grants DP1092887 and LP0560567.