ABSTRACT
Recall from §5.2 that almost all Kimberley languages have two different types of verb, Inflecting verbs (IVs) and Uninflecting verbs (UVs), these being different parts-of-speech that contrast with one another in grammatical properties. IVs always occur in an inflected form; they cannot occur without one or more inflectional affixes peculiar to them. They usually form a smallish closed class that does not accept new words, such as borrowings from English or other Aboriginal languages; they are thus easily characterised as a part-of-speech. The number of IVs differs radically across languages, from about a dozen to several hundred. The larger their number the more likely the part-of-speech will not be absolutely closed: languages with several hundred IVs usually have a few means of deriving IV stems from IV roots, and membership is not as rigidly circumscribed as in languages with just a score or so of IVs.
