The design and trial of an interactive computer program Lata-kuunu to support Warlpiri school children’s literacy learning

Research report by Wendy Baarda on using computers to teach literacy. rtf available for downloading here.

(via Jane Simpson)

Carmel O’Shannessy, Language contact and children’s bilingual acquisition

Carmel O’Shannessy, Language contact and children’s bilingual acquisition: Learning a mixed language and Warlpiri in northern Australia. University of Sydney. Supervisors: Melissa Bowerman and Penelope Brown (MPI Nijmegen), and Jane Simpson (University of Sydney).

This dissertation documents the emergence of a new language, Light Warlpiri, in the multilingual community of Lajamanu in northern Australia. It then examines the acquisition of Light Warlpiri language, and of the heritage language, Lajamanu Warlpiri, by children. Light Warlpiri has arisen from contact between Lajamanu Warlpiri (a Pama-Nyungan language), Kriol (an English-based creole), and varieties of English. It is a Mixed Language, meaning that none of its source languages can be considered to be the sole parent language. Most verbs and the verbal morphology are from Aboriginal English or Kriol, while most nouns and the nominal morphology are from Warlpiri.

The language input to children is complex. Adults older than about thirty speak Lajamanu Warlpiri and code-switch into Aboriginal English or Kriol. Younger adults, the parents of the current cohort of children, speak Light Warlpiri and code-switch into Lajamanu Warlpiri and into Aboriginal English or Kriol. Lajamanu Warlpiri and Light Warlpiri, the two main input languages to children, both indicate A arguments with ergative case-marking (and they share one allomorph of the marker), but Lajamanu Warlpiri includes the marker much more consistently than Light Warlpiri. Word order is variable in both languages. Children learn both languages from birth, but they target Light Warlpiri as the language of their everyday interactions, and they speak it almost exclusively until four to six years of age. Adults and children show similar patterns of ergative marking and word order in Light Warlpiri. But differences between age groups are found in ergative marking in Lajamanu Warlpiri - for the oldest group of adults, ergative marking is obligatory, but for younger adults and children, it is not.

Determining when children differentiate between two input languages has been a major goal in the study of bilingual acquisition. The two languages in this study share lexical and grammatical properties, making distinctions between them quite subtle. Both adults and children distribute ergative marking differently in the two languages, but show similar word order patterns in both. However the children show a stronger correlation between ergative marking and word order patterns than do the adults, suggesting that they are spearheading processes of language change. In their comprehension of sentences in both Lajamanu Warlpiri and Light Warlpiri, adults use a case-marking strategy to identify the A argument (i.e. N+erg = A argument, No = O argument). The children are not adult-like in using this strategy at age 5, when they also used a word order strategy, but they gradually move towards being adult-like with increased age.

For copies, contact: Carmel O’Shannessy, Language Resource Officer, DEET NT, PO Box 1420, Alice Springs NT 0870, ph no: 08 89 517 006, carmeloshannessy-at-gmail.com.

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.

Lines and Criss-crossings: Hyperlinks and Australian Indigenous Narratives

By Barbara Glowczewski. pdf is available here.

Warlpiri Preverbs

An old but important paper by David Nash on Warlpiri preverbs is now available at his web site. The link below goes directly to the pdf.

http://www.anu.edu.au/linguistics/nash/papers/1982-Wlp-preverbs.pdf