A Longitudinal Study of Ngarrindjeri

A Longitudinal Study of Ngarrindjeri

Corinne Bannister.

This thesis aims to follow the changes that occur in Ngarrindjeri, a language from South Australia, over a period of 130 years. Over this period of time the speakers underwent great social and cultural change, with the settlement of white people, and the language changed from being a vibrant living language to one where only a few lexical items can be remembered. Particular attention is given to the syntactic changes, with a focus on case, the pronominal system and the antipassive function. A range of sources have been used; however Meyer’s grammar from 1843 and the Berndt texts, recorded in the 1940s, plus the accompanying analysis provided by Cerin (1994), receive the main focus because they are the most extensive descriptions of the language. The other sources are used when necessary to fill in the gaps. Chapter one introduces the language and the source material. It also discusses general concepts in language attrition. Chapter two deals with nominal morphology, with a particular focus on how the cases have changed. It also contains some reanalysis of the forms, which differs slightly from previous analyses. Chapter three address the pronominal morphology and identifies and explains discrepancies among the sources. This chapter contains information on the personal pronouns, reflexive pronouns and also a small section on how the pronominal system influenced a change in word order. Chapter four addresses the antipassive in Ngarrindjeri. Previous work on the antipassive has been scarce, so firstly this chapter establishes the form of the antipassive. Next it identifies the semantic uses of the construction. Finally, there is an investigation into the existence of a syntactic antipassive and the type of pivots that may also exist.

Australia’s Linguistic Profile

Rebuilding Australia’s Linguistic Profile: Recent Developments in Research on Australian Aboriginal Languages

Alice Gaby.

The more than 250 languages spoken in Australia prior to the nineteenth century exhibit both striking similarities to one another and remarkable variation. The exponential increase in what linguists have learned about these languages since the 1960s has been sadly in inverse proportion to the number of people learning them as a mother tongue. This article will review some of the most exciting recent developments in Australianist linguistic research, while also acknowledging the context of language loss and disenfranchisement within which they are situated. The message it offers is ultimately optimistic, however. For the languages still spoken regularly, research into the previously neglected components of the multimodal communicative system that is language in use is adding new depth to the existing documentation. For the majority of Australia’s indigenous languages – where economic, social and political pressures have taken their toll – a different set of concerns has emerged. Linguists are now grappling with a range of theoretical and empirical questions regarding the mechanisms of language contact and attrition, even as they continue to contribute new insights into the traditional ‘core’ fields of phonetics and phonology, morphosyntax, semantics and historical linguistics. Moreover, an increasing consciousness of the respective roles of outsider researcher and speech community is changing not only the methodologies of linguists ‘in the field’, but also the research itself. All of these factors will shape the directions of future Australianist linguistic research, as well as the number and nature of languages that remain to be studied.

Australian Aboriginal Studies

Latest issue on songs and song language.

Articles
Musical and linguistic perspectives on Aboriginal song Allan Marett and Linda Barwick	abstract	1
Iwaidja Jurtbirrk songs: Bringing language and music together Linda Barwick, Bruce Birch, Nicholas Evans	abstract	6
Morrdjdjanjno ngan-marnbom story nakka, ‘songs that turn me into a story teller’: The morrdjdjanjno of western Arnhem Land Murray Garde	abstract	35
Sung and spoken: An analysis of two different versions of a Kun-barlang love song Isabel O’Keeffe (nee Bickerdike)	abstract	46
Simplifying musical practice in order to enhance local identity: Rhythmic modes in the Walakandha wangga (Wadeye, Northern Territory) Allan Marett	abstract	63
‘Too long, that wangga’: Analysing wangga texts over time Lysbeth Ford	abstract	76
Flesh with country: Juxtaposition and minimal contrast in the construction and melodic treatment of jadmi song texts Sally Treloyn	abstract	90
The poetics of central Australian Aboriginal song Myfany Turpin	abstract	100
Budutthun ratja wiyinymirri: Formal flexibility in the Yolŋu manikay tradition and the challenge of recording a complete repertoire Aaron Corn with Neparrŋ a Gumbula	abstract	116
Australian Aboriginal song language: So many questions, so little to work with Michael Walsh	abstract	128

OzPhon2007

Some of the handouts to the OzPhon workshop are available here. (See also the summary by Jane here.)

Media Databases

David Nash’s summary of media databases used for Australian languages.

Morpholexical Transparency and the argument structure of verbs of cutting and breaking

Juergen Bohnemeyer: Cognitive Linguistics 18:2: 153-177

Guerssel et al.’s (1985) generalizations regarding the argument structure of verbs of cutting and breaking (C&B, hereafter) are reanalyzed based on the principles of Morpholexical Transparency and Complete Linking. A working hypothesis according to which the C&B domain is universally exhaustively partitioned into argument structure classes of C&B verbs is proposed and tested against a corpus of data from 17 languages. Counterevidence to the hypothesis includes bipolar verbs that are semantically specific both on the state change and its cause and a language that lacks cut verbs, framing severance as state change. The survey suggests that universals of argument structure include the principles of Morpholexical Transparency and Complete Linking, but not specific verb classes.

Cutting and Breaking

The semantic categories of cutting and breaking events: a cross-linguistic study
Asifa Majid, Melissa Bowerman, Miriam van Staden, James S. Boster

Cognitive Linguistics 18/2: 133-152

This special issue of Cognitive Linguistics explores the linguistic encoding of events of cutting and breaking. In this article we first introduce the project on which it is based by motivating the selection of this conceptual domain, presenting the methods of data collection used by all the investigators, and characterizing the language sample. We then present a new approach to examining crosslinguistic similarities and differences in semantic categorization. Applying statistical modeling to the descriptions of cutting and breaking events elicited from speakers of all the languages, we show that although there is crosslinguistic variation in the number of distinctions made and in the placement of category boundaries, these differences take place within a strongly constrained semantic space: across languages, there is a surprising degree of consensus on the partitioning of events in this domain. In closing, we compare our statistical approach with more conventional semantic analyses, and show how an extensional semantic typological approach like the one illustrated here can help illuminate the intensional distinctions made by languages.

Intonation Units and Grammatical Structure in Wardaman

Intonation Units and Grammatical Structure in Wardaman

William Croft, AJL.

The distribution of grammatical units (GUs) across intonation units (IUs) is analyzed in a corpus of 2,072 intonation units of Wardaman monologic oral narrative, and compared to a previously published study of English and several other languages. Since English and Wardaman are structurally very different languages, any common patterns in the mapping of grammatical units to intonation units would be of considerable interest as potential grammar-discourse universals. The Full GU Condition - IUs are almost always full GUs - holds in Wardaman as well as English and other languages. Both English and Wardaman employ a substantial number of grammatically independent noun phrase intonation units. Three factors constrain the occurrence of GUs in a single IU in English, in descending order of strength: parallelism, complexity and distance. All three factors also hold in Wardaman in the same order of strength. The behaviour of the IU-GU mapping in Wardaman supports critiques of the analyses of arguments as adjuncts and of modifiers as appositive phrases. On the other hand, spoken English displays more grammatical characteristics similar to Wardaman than prescriptive written English.

Ockham’s Razor

A somewhat out of date now link to an Ockham’s Razor program by David Rose (University of Sydney), which includes discussion of prehistory.

Language books: Noongar.

Kiangardarup has a post on Noongar language books.