17 Australia and New Guinea 17.1 Dalabon Maïa Ponsonnet and Nicholas Evans 1 Introduction 1.1 Context Dalabon is a polysynthetic language of Northern Australia, with only half a dozen remain- ing speakers. It belongs to the non-Pama-Nyungan Gunwinyguan family. There is as yet no comprehensive reference grammar, but information on various aspects of the language can be found in Evans, Brown and Corbett (2001), Evans and Merlan (2003), Evans, Merlan and Tukumba (2004), Ross (2011) and Ponsonnet (2015) (see Cutield’s 2011, 22 literature review). There are no augmentative devices in Dalabon. Diminutives, on the other hand, are frequent in emotional speech, but have not previously been reported for the language. One reason is that they do not occur with equal frequency in all contexts, and it was the deployment of methods designed to elicit emotion-laden speech in Dalabon as part of the irst author’s doctoral thesis (Ponsonnet 2014) which brought a much higher proportion of diminutive use – speciically the showing of three emotionally charged ilms about Aboriginal stories (Ten Canoes, Samson and Delilah and Rabbit-Proof Fence), for which commentary was sought. 1.2 Diminutive =wurd =Wurd is an enclitic derived from the noun wurd ‘woman’s child’, whose reduplicated form wurdurd 1 means ‘child’. This matches the etymology postulated by Jurafsky (1996) for diminutives in various languages. Like many diminutives worldwide, Dalabon =wurd has three uses: denoting small objects, adding emotional connotations, and pragmatic functions, particularly interactional softening (which we will not present here for reasons of space). Section 2 summarises the respective distribution of these values of the Dalabon diminutives. Section 3 discusses denotational (scalar) senses, and Section 4 emotional meanings. 2 Distributional proile =Wurd can attach to most word classes. Nouns are the most common host, especially nouns referring to persons, and less frequently animals or inanimates. =Wurd is also not uncom- mon on verbs. It occurs, much more rarely, on adjectives, adverbs, numerals and demonstra- tives. We leave these marginal cases aside to focus on the diminutives with nouns and verbs.