Language of Poetry and Song

CALL FOR PAPERS

Language of poetry and song
Australian Linguistics Society Conference 2007
Adelaide, September 26-28

The ‘Language of poetry and song’ is a one-day cross-disciplinary workshop at the annual Australian Linguistics Society Conference held at the University of Adelaide, September 26-28, 2007.

The workshop is an opportunity for researchers working on either recent or traditional musical genres within linguistics, ethnomusicology or anthropology to explore linguistic features of song/poetry with others working in this field.

Papers should address issues such as

* How do musical form and linguistic form interact?
* Are there restrictions on the types of grammatical structures found in song/poetry?
* Can words be shortened or extended to fit song metre?
* What sorts of special vocabulary do they contain? If there are ‘fillers’ what are their metrical purposes?
* How do the intended meanings of song/poetry differ, or go beyond, the meanings in speech?
* How do the meanings and broader significances of song/poetry relate to the local social context?

Papers addressing other issues relating to the language of song or poetry are also welcome. Presentations should be 20 minutes long with 10 minutes for questions.

Abstracts must not be longer than 300 words and be submitted by March 16th, 2007 in word or PDF format to:
christina.eira AT adelaide.edu.au

Language diversity in the Pacific

A recent book published by Multilingual matters including three articles of relevance to Australia. The publisher’s page for the book is here.

Summary from site:

The Southwest Pacific from Southern China through Indonesia, Australia and the Pacific Islands constitutes the richest linguistic region of the world. That rich resource cannot be taken for granted. Some of its languages have already been lost; many more are under threat. The challenge is to describe the languages that exist today and to adopt policies that will support their maintenance.

Nekes and Worms’ Australian Languages

Somehow I forgot to post that Bill McGregor’s edition of Australian Languages (Nekes and Worms) is out. Here is the publisher’s blurb.

Australian Languages is the magnum opus of Hermann Nekes and Ernest Worms, two missionary linguists who undertook pioneering investigations of a number of languages spoken in Dampier Land and the Kimberley (far north west of Australia) and to a lesser extent further afield, in Queensland and New South Wales during the 1930s and 1940s. Presenting a wealth of information on many now extinct or moribund languages, the work is of enormous value to descendants of speakers as well as to linguists, including Australianists, descriptive linguists, typologists, and historians of linguistics.

The original text of Australian Languages, which appeared previously only on micro-film, is divided into five parts: a grammar outlining some of the major features of Australian languages (with particular focus on the Nyulnyulan languages traditionally spoken on Dampier Land); an English finder list; an alphabetically arranged wordlist covering a variety of languages; a separate wordlist of Dyirbal (North Queensland), and a small number of texts.

William B. McGregor has revised, annotated and updated the material. An accompanying CD-ROM contains a digitized facsimile of the entire original micro-film with links to an electronic version of the book, a user-friendly database version of the dictionaries and other accompanying material.

It really is a very impressive volume.

Coronals and Velars: Support for Blust

A recent squib by Mark Donohue in Oceanic Linguistics on the naturalness of the sound change t > k. Includes data from Australian languages.

Abstract:

Robert Blust raises the issue of the *t > k change that is widely attested in Austronesian languages, but infrequently in other language families. He offers both structural and perceptual explanations for the “naturalness” of this change, but admits that the data raise more questions than can be answered. I offer support for the view that this change is not unnatural, based on the distribution of stop types cross-linguistically, and the patterns that are found. I introduce another kind of argumentation, that of typologically determined systemic naturalness, in the spirit of Evolutionary Phonology

Ergativity

Mario van de Visser’s PhD on ergativity has been published by LOT. It features data from quite a few Australian languages. Here is the publisher’s blurb:

From an empirical point of view, ergativity is a marked phenomenon. The
pattern occurs in only a quarter of the world's languages, and even those
languages displaying it often apply it restrictively. Former analyses have
not paid much attention to this fact, as most of them formulate a
macro-parameter whose sole function is to distinguish between ergative and
non-ergative languages. This study predicts the marked status of
ergativity, deriving the pattern from an independently motivated parameter.

It is argued that Ergative case cannot be structural. Rather, it is like a
semantic case in that it occurs on adjunct nouns in clitic-doubling
constructions. Nonconfigurational languages like Warlpiri allow for
ergative case marking because of the fact that they realize every verbal
argument by a pronominal argument (PA). Adjunct nouns may double the PAs.
In languages like Kurmanji, Basque, Northwest Caucasian and Mayan, both
case and agreement may display ergativity. This is explained by assuming
that only the transitive subject is clitic-doubled. Evidence for this
explanation is found by comparing verbal inflectional paradigms to
independent pronouns and by investigating the referential properties of the
supposed adjunct nouns.

Ergativity, then, is linked to a macro-parameter dividing languages between
those that do not allow for PAs and those that do. In languages with PAs,
ergative patterns may be further restricted to certain values of functional
heads such as I, accounting for split ergativity.

The marked status of ergativity is of relevance to both theoretical
syntacticians and typologists interested in ergativity, agreement, case,
clitic-doubling and nonconfigurationality.

Language of the Hunter River and Lake Macquarie

Linguistlist book announcement is here. A link to the order form can be found here.

Book description (from Linguistlist posting

This grammar and wordlist is a valuable language revitalization tool for Aboriginal people of the Hunter River and Lake Macquarie Region of New South Wales. It will appeal to anyone who is interested in the Aboriginal Languages of Australia. It is primarily based on the work of the Reverend Lancelot Threlkeld, who, in the first half of the nineteenth century, wrote a comprehensive account of the language taught to him by Biraban. The evidence from archival sources suggests that the language described by Threlkeld as ‘The language of the Hunter River and Lake Macquarie’ was spoken by people now known as Awabakal, Kuringgai, Wonnarua, and perhaps Geawegal. Amanda Lissarrague presents a clear and succinct interpretation of the phonology and grammar of the language in terms that are accessible to both the layman and the specialist. This work also contains a vocabulary written in a practical spelling system, and a database of example sentences. Muurrbay is a nonprofit Aboriginal organization that supports the coastal languages of northern and central N.S.W. through its auspicing of the Many Rivers Aboriginal Language Centre. The grammar is © Wonnarua Nation Aboriginal Corporation. Please email enquiries to muurrbay@westnet.com.au.