Rob Pensalfini’s UQ eSpace Page

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

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.

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.

Antipassives in Yukulta

Antipassives in Yukulta

JESSICA DENNISS

1 Introduction2

An antipassive construction in Yukulta (Australia: Tangkic, non-Pama-Nyungan) was
identified by Keen (1983) as an important syntactic construction that was used to code
certain types of propositions. This paper seeks to build on Keen’s description of the
antipassive by examining the various contexts in which it is used, and by isolating the
features which control its distribution relative to active transitive constructions.
Section 2 will define the antipassive, Section 3 will review two functional typologies
of the construction, Section 4 and 5 will focus on identifying and describing Yukulta’s
antipassive and Section 6 will discuss some of the atypical features that antipassives
have in this language.

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

Representation of Third Person

Andrew Nevins. NLLT. Includes data from Australian languages

 Abstract  In modeling the effects of the Person-Case Constraint (PCC), a common claim is that 3rd person “is not a person”. However, while this claim does work in the syntax, it creates problems in the morphology. For example, characterizing the well-known “spurious se effect” in Spanish simply cannot be done without reference to 3rd person. Inspired by alternatives to underspecification that have emerged in phonology (e.g., Calabrese, 1995), a revised featural system is proposed, whereby syntactic agreement may be relativized to certain values of a feature, in particular, the contrastive and marked values. The range of variation in PCC effects is shown to emerge as a consequence of the parametric options allowed on a Probing head, whereas the representation of person remains constant across modules of the grammar and across languages.

Evolutionary Game Theory

Includes data from Australian languages.

Jäger, Gerhard, 1967-
• Evolutionary Game Theory and Typology: A Case Study
  [Access article in PDF]
  Subject Headings:
  • Grammar, Comparative and general — Case.
  • Historical linguistics.

  Abstract:

  This article deals with the typology of the case marking of semantic core roles. The competing economy considerations of hearer (disambiguation) and speaker (minimal effort) are formalized in terms of EVOLUTIONARY GAME THEORY. It is shown that the case-marking patterns that are attested in the languages of the world are those that are evolutionarily stable for different relative weightings of speaker economy and hearer economy, given the statistical patterns of language use that were extracted from corpora of naturally occurring conversations.

Linguistic Indulgence

Many papers in Language Description, History and Development : Linguistic indulgence in memory of Terry Crowley Edited by Jeff Siegel, John Lynch and Diana Eades are on Australian languages.

2. A desiderative complement construction in Warrwa.
William B. McGregor
27-40
3. Noun incorporation in Rembarrnga discourse.
Graham R. McKay
41-52
4. A revised view of the verbal suffixes of Yugambeh-Bundjalung
M.C. Sharpe
53-68
16. Complex predication and the coverb construction
Mengistu Amberber, Brett Baker and Mark Harvey
209-219
19. Nganyaywana revisited: Lessons from Terry Crowley’s work on New England languages
Paul Black
255-265
20. Divergent regularity in word-initial truncation in the Arandic languages
Harold Koch
267-280
32. The Crowley corrective: An alternative voice for language endangerment
Michael Walsh
431-437
34. Funeral liturgy as a strategy for language revival
Rob Amery and Dennis O’Brien
457-467

(Hat-tip: David Nash)

Reciprocal constructions

Reciprocal Constructions
Edited by Vladimir P. Nedjalkov

Of particular interest to Australianists:

Part II. Reflexive-reciprocal polysemy of reciprocal markers
C. Pronominal reciprocal marker only
21. Reciprocal constructions in Djaru
Tasaku Tsunoda

Part IV. Reflexive-reciprocal-sociative polysemy of reciprocal markers. Verbal reciprocal marker only
32. Reciprocal constructions in Warrungu
Tasaku Tsunoda

(Hat-tip: David Nash)

Structure and Variation in Language Contact

Structure and variation in langu contact, edited by Ana Deumert and Stephanie Durrleman

This volume presents a careful selection of fifteen articles presented at the SPCL meetings in Atlanta, Boston and Hawai’i in 2003 and 2004. The contributions reflect – from various perspectives and using different types of data – on the interplay between structure and variation in contact languages, both synchronically and diachronically. The contributors consider a wide range of languages, including Surinamese creoles, Chinook Jargon, Yiddish, AAVE, Haitian Creole, Afro-Hispanic and Afro-Portuguese varieties, Nigerian Pidgin, Sri Lankan Malay, Papiamentu, and Bahamian Creole English. A need to question and test existing claims regarding pidginization/creolization is evident in all contributions, and the authors provide analyses for a variety of grammatical structures: VO-ordering and affixation, agglutination, negation, TMAs, plural marking, the copula, and serial verb constructions. The volume provides ample evidence for the observation that pidgin/creole studies is today a mature subfield of linguistics which is making important contributions to general linguistic theory.

The link includes the table of contents. No papers specifically on Australian languages but certainly of general interest.