Rob Pensalfini’s UQ eSpace Page

Rob Pensalifini has an eSpace page with links to recent (and classic) papers of his, especially on Jingulu.

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.

University of Melbourne Ling E-prints

The University of Melbourne’s Department of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics ePrint repository has a number of works on Australian languages

Explaining Color Term Typology With an Evolutionary Model

Journal article which includes data from Australian languages: http://www.leaonline.com/doi/abs/10.1207/s15516709cog3101_4?prevSearch=authorsfield%3A%28Dowman%2CMike%29

An expression-induction model was used to simulate the evolution of basic color terms to test Berlin and Kay’s (1969) hypothesis that the typological patterns observed in basic color term systems are produced by a process of cultural evolution under the influence of biases resulting from the special properties of universal focal colors. Ten agents were simulated, each of which could learn color term denotations by generalizing from examples using Bayesian inference, and for which universal focal red, yellow, green, and blue were especially salient, but unevenly spaced in the perceptual color space. Conversations between these agents, in which agents would learn from one another, were simulated over several generations, and the languages emerging at the end of each simulation were investigated. The proportion of color terms of each type correlated closely with the equivalent frequencies found in the World Color Survey, and most of the emergent languages could be placed on one of the evolutionary trajectories proposed by Kay and Maffi (1999). The simulation therefore demonstrates how typological patterns can emerge as a result of learning biases acting over a period of time.

Grammars of Space

CUP page for Levinson and Wilkins (eds) Grammars of Space is here. A detailed table of contents list can be found here.

Publisher’s blurb:

Spatial language - that is, the way languages structure the spatial domain - is an important area of current research, offering new insights into one of the most central areas of human cognition. In this pioneering collection, a team of leading scholars review the spatial domain across a wide variety of languages. Contrary to existing assumptions, they show that there is great variation in the way space is conceptually structured across languages, thus substantiating the controversial question of how far the foundations of human cognition are innate. Grammars of Space is a supplement to the psychological information provided in its companion volume, Space in Language and Cognition. It represents a new kind of work in linguistics, ‘Semantic Typology’, which asks what are the semantic parameters used to structure particular semantic fields. Comprehensive and informative, it will be essential reading for those working on comparative linguistics, spatial cognition, and the interface between them.

Colour terms and Australian languages

Link to abstract of David Nash’s paper Colour and the Ordinary Working Linguist.

Link to abstract of Anna Wierzbicka’s paper Deconstructing ‘colour’, exploring indigenous meanings.

See also Jane Simpson’s report here.

Colour universals: Wierzbicka

There are no “Color Universals” But There Are Universals of Visual semantics: Anna Wierzbicka. Anthropological Linguistics 47/2. Link goes to abstract. Not available online to my knowledge.