What follows is a revision of the sections on grammar and phonology of the writer's London PhD thesis [Dixon, 1968a]. The main points of the semantics section have already been summarised in print [Dixon, 1971]. Further work on the lexicon, and its semantic structure, with particular reference to the special ‘mother-in-law language’ (2.5, 8.1), is proceeding, with a view to the eventual publication of a comprehensive dictionary-thesaurus of Dyirbal.

Since the grammatical natures of Australian languages are not widely known, it has seemed worthwhile, in chapter 1, to give a brief survey of some of the recurring characteristics of languages across the continent. In addition, some references to points of similarity in the grammars of other languages are included, in smaller type, throughout the description of Dyirbal.

The grammar is written at two distinct ‘levels’. The ‘facts’ of the grammar – affixes, their syntactic effect, types of construction, and so on – are described in chapters 3, 4 and 6. Chapter 5 interprets some of these facts, setting up explanatory generalisations and describing the ‘deep’ grammar of Dyirbal in terms of a number of syntactic relations and a number of transformational rules. It has seemed desirable to (at least partially) separate facts from interpretations in the case of a language like Dyirbal that has not previously been described in any way. The correctness of chapters 3, 4 and 6 cannot seriously be in dispute. Chapter 5, however, is far more open to argument.