Search

This paper analyzes the functions of interactional devices used by co-tellers in multiparty stories in Umpila and Kuuku Ya'u, two closely related dialects of a Paman language of Cape York Peninsula, Australia. Within the Umpila and Kuuku Ya'u speech community there is a strong cultural preference for multiparty storytelling – a preference which has been noted in a number of Aboriginal Australian contexts. This paper seeks to understand the mechanisms through which co-tellers in these multiparty narratives contribute to the story. It first discusses co-teller roles, and distinguishes three key narrator roles and orders of conduct associated with each. The analysis then focuses on the use of questions and evaluative comments used by one type of co-teller, supporting narrators. The following discussion demonstrates that questions and evaluative comments go beyond immediate functions of seeking information or spontaneous expressive reactions. They help to fulfil expectations on supporting narrators to engage actively in the talk. It is additionally shown that these devices have functions in highlighting key aspects of the story and developing stance in intricate ways that complement the main line of the storytelling. The analysis demonstrates the close coordination of co-tellers in constructing a story; piece-by-piece they collaboratively describe and evaluate the story events as a group, prioritizing a local and situated shared telling over other potential story goals like performance and progressivity of a plot. The analysis of Umpila and Kuuku Ya'u storytelling contributes to the field of interaction and narrative studies by furthering our understanding of the organization of storytelling in different cultures and languages contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Murrinhpatha, a non-Pama-Nyungan language from the Daly region of the Northern Territory of Australia, has an extant ergative case marker that has been reported to be very rare in use. In this paper we report on the use of ergative marking in an experimental study of sentence production. Forty-six adult L1 speakers of Murrinhpatha were asked to describe a series of unrelated bivalent scenes that were manipulated for humanness (±human) in the agent and patient roles. Our results show higher than expected ergative use given previous descriptions (more than 14% of utterances with an overt agent NP). Furthermore, we found an alternating pattern between multiple ergative markers that is correlated with variations in word order and humanness of agent and patient characters. This pattern seems consistent with the available naturalistic corpus, but the rate of ergative marking is so low that it may never have been identified. Our study both contributes to the typology of ergative case marking and demonstrates the value of experimental research for language description in unearthing properties of the grammatical system that may not be easily discernible in other types of corpora. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ngarrindjeri is one of many Aboriginal languages being actively revived in southern Australia. Women in the Ngarrindjeri community have expressed a desire to speak, read and write their language with the same richness as when it was spoken fluently over 70 years ago. Like many Aboriginal languages, Ngarrindjeri has a rich selection of free and bound pronouns, which express person, number and case, but unlike most other Australian languages, it has a third set of reduced free form pronouns. This tripartite set is used to express discourse saliency and continuing topic, and to definitize noun phrases. This paper addresses the issue of teaching and learning how to use Ngarrindjeri pronouns in traditional ways, but for contemporary purposes. Learning Ngarrindjeri requires understanding grammatical categories such as case that differ substantially from English, plus understanding the use of free forms for discourse saliency, bound forms for continuing topics, and free reduced forms where English uses articles. Finally, it requires memorizing a large number of pronoun forms. We share anecdotes on learning pronouns from individual authors, and a reflection from a young Ngarrindjeri woman. We then propose strategies and resources to make it easier to learn, remember and use the complex, regularized pronoun paradigms of Ngarrindjeri. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marri Tjevin is the language of the Rak Thangkurral and Rak Nadirri people of the Daly River region in northern Australia. Unusually for an Australian language, Marri Tjevin has fricatives at all points of articulation /β, ð, ʐ, ʒ, ɣ/, contrasting with phonetically long, voiceless stops /p, t̪, t, ȶ, k/. These series are only contrastive word-medially, while most word-initial obstruents vary freely in stricture and voicing, which constitutes a typologically unusual form of obstruent manner neutralization. Additionally there are two contrastive voiced stops /b, d/, which occur both medially and initially. In this paper we present the first detailed analysis of Marri Tjevin's system of obstruent contrasts and positional neutralization, as well as reporting an interesting association between phonemic stops and prosodic prominence. We argue that the Marri Tjevin stop/fricative contrast shows distributional and phonetic commonalities with fortis/lenis obstruent contrasts in some other Australian languages, while the association of phonemic stops with prosodic prominence also echoes patterns observed elsewhere in Australia. Thus, while Marri Tjevin's system of fricative contrast and neutralization is typologically unusual, it shows striking parallels with other Australian phonologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we demonstrate that Anindilyakwa, spoken on Groote Eylandt, East Arnhem Land, is genetically closely related to Wubuy (Gunwinyguan). Anindilyakwa has long been believed to be a family-level isolate, but by a rigorous application of the Comparative Method we uncover regular sound correspondences from lexical correspondence sets, reconstruct the sound system of the proto-language, and suggest how the proto-phoneme inventory derives from the proto-Gunwinyguan system through phonological innovations. Although it has been hinted before that Anindilyakwa and Wubuy are related and together with Ngandi form a subgroup, this hypothesis is not borne out here: while Wubuy and Ngandi have been shown to share a significant amount of core vocabulary and irregular verbal paradigms, Anindilyakwa and Wubuy appear to have undergone separate development for a considerable length of time. Moreover, Anindilyakwa has independently undergone extensive further sound changes, resulting in a language that is phonologically (though not lexically or grammatically) quite unusual in Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a lexical study of rations – flour, sugar, tea and tobacco – in Australian languages. The distribution of food played an important role in relations between Aboriginal people and colonizers: this study complements existing historical and ethnographic work on the topic by investigating the lexicon of rations in a set of 197 languages across Australia. We discern a number of patterns. There are relatively few extensions of terms for traditional equivalents in the case of 'flour', 'sugar' and 'tea', for a number of reasons, while 'tobacco' shows more such extensions. Extensions based on other terms highlight semantic features like texture for flour and sugar, shape of the main ingredient for tea, and smoking as the new mode of consumption for tobacco. Other minor patterns highlight colour, processing and flavour. There is also some areal patterning in the data, some related to borrowing, from Austronesian languages as well as internally, and others based on semantic structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pre-stopping is a widespread and usually non-contrastive phenomenon in Australian languages. Contrastive pre-stopping is rare and materials on it are limited. Based partly on original phonetic data, this paper provides evidence that Arabana, a language of northern South Australia, has contrastive pre-stopping of both laterals and nasals. Current analyses of pre-stopping, both contrastive and non-contrastive, model pre-stopped sequences as complex segments, and relate their diachrony to perceptual motivations favouring the enhancement in the discrimination of place oppositions. We provide evidence that pre-stopped sequences in Arabana are best analyzed as heterosyllabic clusters, and that their diachrony centrally involves perceptual motivations favouring the augmentation of phonologically strong constituents, specifically stressed syllables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A linguistic puzzle has always been the extent of the influence of Irish English on the shaping of postcolonial dialects such as Australian English (AusE). In order to investigate the presence/absence of ‘Irishisms’ in the formative years of AusE, this paper examines two sub-corpora of AusNC—COOEE (texts of Australia, New Zealand and Norfolk Island origin between 1788 and 1900) and, for comparison, the literary representations of Irish in several nineteenth and twentieth century novels of AusLit (a collection of poetry, fiction and criticism ranging from 1790s to the 1930s). While studies of new dialect formation have focused overwhelmingly on phonological features (with the notable exception of Fritz in 2005), this paper is concerned with grammatical aspects, in particular syntactic features of Irish English such asit-clefting; the ‘hot news’ (or ‘immediate’) perfectivebe after[VERB]-ing; habitualdo(es) be[VERB]-ing; the infinitival markerfor-to; epistemicmustn't; plural second person pronoun forms(yous(e), yez)and Finalbut. Our findings help shed light on the linguistic processes that were going on during this crucial period for the formation of AusE, especially with regard to the levelling out of grammatical variation in the new dialect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper tells previously untold stories about the dynamic cultures, linguistic repertoires and language practices of migrants and refugees that are continuously shaped and mediated by the convoluted histories, journeys and migration itineraries of these people. It brings to light the effect of proficiency in multiple languages on their speakers' affiliations, and their perceptions of belonging in local communities. The paper draws on the outcomes of a study with refugee background Africans (hereafter, African diasporas) in regional New South Wales (NSW) to propose the language nesting model that seeks to illustrate the complex linguistic and discursive practices of these people and how such resources are used to create and negotiate material and social spaces in everyday life. The paper concludes that the stories that were elicited—about the languages, cultures, identities, migration histories and just about everything else about the sampled African diasporas—both support and resist the theoretical suppositions of superdiversity in equal measure. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Warndarrang and Marra have a high level of shared vocabulary, 54%, and also share some grammatical morphemes and structures. The question is whether these commonalities result from borrowing, inheritance from a lower level proto-language, inheritance from a higher level proto-language, or a mixture of all three. If the shared lexicon results principally from borrowing, then this would establish a significant new peak for lexical borrowing in Australia, as the highest reliable level otherwise attested is 40%. There are proposals for a low level proto-language including Warndarrang and Marra, most commonly known as Proto-Marran. This paper shows that there is not sufficient evidence to include Warndarrang within the putative Marran family. Consequently, the 54% shared lexicon between Warndarrang and Marra does establish a new peak in lexical borrowing. However, despite this peak, the paper shows that there has only been minimal grammatical borrowing between Warndarrang and Marra, and that most shared grammatical morphemes reflect inheritance from a higher level proto-language, possibly Proto-Australian. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper analyses the functions of represented speech and thought (RST) in narratives in Umpithamu, a Pama-Nyungan language of Cape York Peninsula (Australia). The paper first surveys the different mechanisms available for marking a shift from the narrator's deictic centre to a narrative participant, including a number of constructions that use perception and motion predicates to signal RST. The analysis then focuses on the narrative functions of RST, showing that it has a macrostructural function beyond the representation of a specific participant's speech and thought, more specifically highlighting the central episodes of a narrative. The evidence comes from an analysis of three genres with a different macrostructure: one (personal history) for which the classic Labovian schema of complication–resolution works well and two others (both dealing with the supernatural world) that rely on different structuring principles. It is shown that RST is systematically associated with central episodes across the three genres, and that the location and nature of RST co-vary with the different location and nature of these episodes in the three genres. In narratives of supernatural encounter, for instance, RST conveys modal negotiation about the interpretation of the central events in terms of the supernatural world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to evaluate the Proto-Iwaidjan hypothesis, which proposes that several languages in northwestern Arnhem Land in Northern Australia are genetically related. The evaluation is based on a rigorous application of the Comparative Method to provide an initial reconstruction of the Proto-Iwaidjan segmental inventory. We show that Amurdak, Iwaidja and Mawng are demonstrably genetically related. Given that Ilgar and Garig are very close in terms of grammar and vocabulary to Iwaidja, their membership of the Iwaidjan family is also supported. However, there is insufficient evidence to support the inclusion of Marrku, Wurrugu and Manangkari within the Iwaidjan language family. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to evaluate the Proto-Iwaidjan hypothesis, which proposes that several languages in northwestern Arnhem Land in Northern Australia are genetically related. The evaluation is based on a rigorous application of the Comparative Method to provide an initial reconstruction of the Proto-Iwaidjan segmental inventory. We show that Amurdak, Iwaidja and Mawng are demonstrably genetically related. Given that Ilgar and Garig are very close in terms of grammar and vocabulary to Iwaidja, their membership of the Iwaidjan family is also supported. However, there is insufficient evidence to support the inclusion of Marrku, Wurrugu and Manangkari within the Iwaidjan language family. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding how children of different ages and different cultures design and organize their talk allows us to better understand how children demonstrate intersubjectivity, how they structure their social world, and how they orient to social and cultural practices. Although researchers are beginning to re-examine interactionally some of the previous observational claims concerning adult Aboriginal conversational style, less focus has been given to Indigenous children's interactional style. Previous observational claims concerning Aboriginal conversational style include increased toleration of silence, increased occurrence of interruptions, reluctance to respond to questions, and the tendency to enter a conversation without attending to the talk of others. One of the aims of the paper is to examine instances of children's interaction against the backdrop of these observations concerning Aboriginal adult conversation style in order to understand how Indigenous children interact with others within the multilingual environment in which they find themselves. Using the methodology of conversation analysis, the paper analyses the talk of two children from Yakanarra in order to show (a) how the children under analysis responded to a request to do something, and the sorts of techniques used to mobilize such a response; and (b) how the children monitored the surrounding adults' talk occurring within the same interactional space. The analysis, presented against the backdrop of what has been observed to date concerning adult Indigenous conversational style, demonstrates the importance of examining the detail of talk, taking all aspects into account (including prosody, pauses, overlap), in order to understand how two Indigenous children living in Yakanarra interact within their social and cultural worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The language of Aboriginal songs is often described by both researchers and Aboriginal people as being unintelligible to those who do not have the ritual knowledge to understand it. The Minamina yawulyu performed by Warlpiri women from Yuendumu community, Central Australia, is one such song cycle that is described in this way. However, it does not display many instances of ritual or archaic words or phonological skewing that would clearly differentiate this language from everyday Warlpiri. Instead the Minamina yawulyu uses regular language in a connotative way such that it is unintelligible without knowledge of the symbolic associations intended. In this way ritually knowledgeable people who understand the connotations of this language are required to interpret these songs giving them a degree of control over how this knowledge is transmitted. In this paper I will present some examples of metaphor, metonymy and image-schemata along with accompanying exegesis provided by Warlpiri informants. In highlighting this symbolic way of using language I will show that Warlpiri song language uses familiar physical and social experiences in Warlpiri people's lives such as those around landscape, kin relations and physical appearances and movement, to connote emotive responses to country and associated ceremonies. This paper will demonstrate the role of song in passing on the complexity of religious knowledge and also the ways in which ritually knowledgeable people control its transmission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews the evidence on the classification of the Garrwan language family, in terms of the Pama-Nyungan vs Non-Pama-Nyungan opposition. The Garrwan language family is the only family whose status has been analyzed as indeterminate or intermediate with respect to this opposition. This paper shows that Proto-Garrwan was characterized by a high degree of innovation in grammatical morphology. Consequently, there are only limited materials, restricted to the pronominals, which can serve to evaluate its genetic status. This paper shows that this evidence, though limited, is sufficient to classify Garrwan as a Pama-Nyungan family. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper identifies five questions about the possible origins and development of early Australian English and reviews the ways in which scholars have answered these questions so far. But the paper also argues that there are as yet too few empirical studies of early Australian English. Plato's use of reason needs to be followed and complemented by Aristotle's empirical approach. Despite the doubts of some scholars, it is possible to look at early written sources. The paper describes a corpus of early Australian English, the principles followed in building it, and the ways in which it can be used. A progress report on the study of lexis using the corpus is included. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In addition to responding to a polemic from Ramson, this paper seeks to address the issue of Australian culture and its relation to Australian English. Ramson seems to deny the existence of any Australian culture and identity, and of any significant links between culture and language (hence his dismissive attitude to the great pioneer in the study of Australian English and "national character", Sidney Baker). This paper defends the notion of Australian culture, and shows how modern semantics can help to analyze it in accurate and revealing ways. It also demonstrates the links between modern semantics and modern lexicography, and the need to go beyond the nineteenth-century methodology of James Murray. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociology and critical linguistics discuss the influence of parents, teachers and peers in the socialization of children, and the importance of language in early and continuing socialization processes (Parsons 1951; Schutz 1962, 1973; Cicourel 1971; Hodge and Kress 1988). This paper extends these discussions to illustrate that this process is continuously interactive. Using data from everyday situations (Goffman 1966, 1977; Garfinkel 1963, 1967) the paper argues that young children are not only acquiring gender-differential social subjectivities but that they are involved in reinforcing and reproducing the social positions of adults in ways that support dominant traditional social structures. Similarly, it is demonstrated that women facilitate children’s gendered performances that encode positions of power and subordination, and are implicated in the abdication of their own institutionalized power. (Gender and language, socialization of children, ethnomethodology, critical discourse analysis.). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the linking relative (or connectivewhich) in the spontaneous conversation of Australian English. Using a combination of survey and corpus data, two distinct discourse functions are identified: resumptive topic marker and focus. Survey data from 170 linguistics students at an Australian university indicate a strong preference for the resumptive topic marker function: I argue that this is due to the parallel between discourse function and the structure of the standard relative clause. UWA corpus data suggest that the connectivewhichis used solely to create textual cohesion in Australian English, while anecdotal examples from American English podcasts, blogs and the animated TV showArcherhint at the possibility of this becoming an expressive resource for speakers in the future. Thus it appears the Australian English use of the connectivewhichis situated on the textual level of Traugott’s cline: propositional > textual > expressive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the past thirty years John Bernard's acoustic analysis of Australian English vowels (Bernard 1967, 1970) has remained the standard vowel reference for Australian speech researchers. The published papers present a set of data which is generally considered to be representative of vowel productions across the range of accent types available to speakers of the dialect. The present paper provides a reanalysis and reinterpretation of some aspects of the classic Bernard account focusing on the significant spectral differences between the accent types and examining age heterogeneity within the original sample. Multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) is used to investigate the effects of accent type and age on formant frequency values. The results reveal the presence of numerous accent and age effects. Univariate ANOVA and t-tests are used to further refine the analysis and establish the specific differences between the age and accent groups. The presence of age effects can, in some instances, be interpreted as evidence of changes that were in progress at the time of the data collection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dramatic language change has been underway among Gurindji people since European colonization. One major shift has occurred in the use of cardinal directions (N–S–E–W) to express spatial relations. Where older Gurindji adults use 28 inflected forms for each cardinal to describe large and small-scale space, young adults use four forms and only for large-scale space. This paper examines Gurindji children’s knowledge of cardinals to determine whether this change is continuing or has stabilized. The ‘Which-way-is’ task was devised and administered to 53 children and 56 adults. While adults gave 95% correct responses, children gave fewer correct responses (50%) and showed no significant improvement across age groups, although their ability to give a correct response improved significantly if they were asked to point to a location rather than to name the cardinal (78%). These results are interpreted as indicative of loss in the knowledge of the cardinal system rather than an extended acquisition period. However we argue that it is overly simplistic to analyse these results solely in terms of obsolescence. Children gave significantly more correct responses on the east/west axis which suggests continuing attention to geocentric cues but that a transformation in the expression of spatial relations is underway. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Despite the fact that varieties of Aboriginal English are widely used in communication in Aboriginal communities across Australia, the use of Aboriginal English in writing has been limited. A significant genre for Aboriginal writers has been the autobiographical narrative. In most published narratives of this genre, Aboriginal English has not been widely used. This paper describes and discusses an autobiographical narrative composed by Aboriginal author Glenys Collard and published by the Western Australian Department of Training and Workforce Development in 2011 in which the only medium of narration (except for utterances by non-Aboriginal characters) is Aboriginal English. Analysis of this text supports the view that Aboriginal English as depicted in metropolitan Perth exhibits significant linguistic and stylistic continuity with Aboriginal discourse in more remote settings. It is suggested that writing for Aboriginal English readership entails the emergence of a distinctive genre. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper we propose a semantic type-driven account of verb-formation patterns in Panyjima. By offering an explicit theory for the construal of semantically simplex event descriptions from morphologically complex verbal stems, we flesh out intuitions dating back to Clark and Clark (1979) about the role of derivational morphology in the interpretation of derived verbs, especially denominal verbs. This latter point is of particular relevance to a general theory of verb meaning (inclusive of, but not limited to, Aktionsart/lexical aspect), as most formal theories of lexical semantics have been primarily developed for languages with a rich verbal lexicon. By contrast, Australian languages often have a much smaller verbal lexicon and rely more heavily on productive processes of verbalization. The challenge we intend to meet is to provide a formal analysis that matches the productive morphology of the language under investigation. We offer an implementation couched within the Type Composition Logic (TCL) of Asher (2011), which demonstrates how TCL can successfully capture the contextual interpretation of productively derived Panyjima verbs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an overview of the tense, aspect and modality (TAM) system in Murrinh-Patha, a polysynthetic language of the Daly River region of northern Australia. Our aim is to provide a detailed account of the range of TAM categories and their uses, highlighting along the way areas of interest for theoretical semantic analysis. We build here on earlier descriptions of tense, aspect and mood in Murrinh-Patha, most notably work by Street, and argue for reanalysis and refinement in various places, resulting in what we believe to be a more accurate and revealing analysis of the overall system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes an analysis of an aspectual construction in Jaminjung, a non-Pama-Nyungan Australian language of the Mirndi family. At first sight, this looks like construction conveying grammatical aspect, specifically progressive, since it bears both formal and functional resemblances to typical progressive constructions. At closer investigation, however, the two morphemes crucially involved in the construction, a grammatical morpheme = mayan and a ‘semantically light’ inflecting verb, in their combination can be shown to convey lexical rather than grammatical aspect:=mayan, which occurs in a wider range of contexts, can be analysed as a marker of iterativity, and the inflecting verbs -yu ‘be’ and -ijga ‘go’ signal atelicity of different flavours, and are selected as classificatory verbs in analogy to other closed-class verbs in complex predicates in Jaminjung. The findings support a distinction made in the literature between event-internal and event-external pluractionality. Of all pluractionals, only event-internal iterative expressions (which include not only complex predicates but also iterated direct speech) are overtly marked as atelic in Jaminjung, and only those exhibit the functional overlap with a progressive. The study of this construction thus provides an insight into the pathway of grammaticalization between lexical and grammatical aspect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spelling is an area where the varieties of English beg to differ. Whereas British and American English have long been considered as having stable and juxtaposed spelling traditions, this has not been the case for newer varieties such as Australian English. This paper shows that Australian English indeed has its own spelling traditions and that they are not the result of haphazard choices from British and American English. In fact today's Australian spelling is the result of a fascinating historical process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a reanalysis of the TAM categories of Amurdak. Previous work has assumed a contrast of tense categories. It will be shown that such an analysis is inadequate, as it cannot accurately account for the data, because the morphemes representing these categories do not have the function to localize events in time. Instead, it is posited that the Amurdak verb possesses a contrast between a perfective and an imperfective aspect. This permits an accurate explanation of the data, and it is well-supported cross-linguistically. In addition, it opens up interesting questions from the viewpoint of comparative areal and typological linguistics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a preliminary attempt to evaluate the linguistic vitality of Yankunytjatjara spoken in Coober Pedy and other communities in South Australia, with particular emphasis on extra-linguistic factors. The Western Desert dialects Yankunytjatjara and Pitjantjatjara are the two remaining 'strong' languages within South Australia, but considering the socio-cultural and political context wherein Indigenous Australian languages exist as spoken in decreasing numbers by members of encapsulated minorities, subject to an intrusive and increasingly dominant Euro-Australian culture, the question is how strong Yankunytjatjara really is. Different language endangerment indices are incorporated into the discussion with a view to how they apply to the study of contact-induced extensive linguistic change in general, and specifically to Yankunytjatjara. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As in a number of ergative languages, the ergative case-marker -na∼-ma in Warrwa is occasionally found on the subject of intransitive clauses, indeed even on the subject of verbless clauses. I argue that the presence vs. absence of the ergative marker in this environment is not random free variation, but is motivated and highly constrained. The paper is concerned with identifying the motivations. It is proposed, based on an investigation of uses in a corpus of narrative and other texts, that two features are relevant: (a) semantic - the subject is highly agentive; and (b) referential - the identity of the subject is not predictable: it is unexpected. Use of the ergative on an intransitive subject thus highlights both the agentivity and the unexpectedness of the subject. I argue that, contrary to recent claims by some, Warrwa is not an active language: it is not the case that -na∼-ma groups together some intransitive and transitive subjects, while zero marking groups some intransitive subjects with transitive objects; these groupings are, I argue, purely formal and epiphenomenal. Finally, I situate optional marking of intransitive subjects in Warrwa in a wider theory of optional case marking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While heavy lexical borrowing can pose a problem to any approach to linguistic prehistory, it has often been regarded as an especially difficult problem for lexicostatistics, especially in such areas as Australia, where some believe that extensive borrowing is the norm. The present paper applies lexicostatistics to what is arguably the most massive case of borrowing known for Australia, namely between the Jingulu and Mudburra languages of the Northern Territory, and finds that it actually leads to what is generally considered the correct genetic classification of these languages. This result is then shown to depend on certain relationships among the lexicostatistical percentages that may not always obtain in other cases of heavy borrowing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study presents an acoustic examination of the 18 stressed monophthongs and diphthongs of Standard Australian English, detailing the frequency and durational characteristics of these vowels produced in the hVd context by 60 male and 60 female adolescent talkers from Sydney. It entails a rigorous acoustic analysis using objective signal processing techniques to detail vowel structure in a strictly controlled fashion. The paper additionally provides the first large-scale published analysis of vowels produced by Australian females and compares vowel formant and durational characteristics across the sexes. The results provide a point of reference for those who require detailed acoustic information about Standard Australian English vowel production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Youth music in Australia has long been said to involve an aping of American stylistic features including, significantly, accents. Australian Hip Hop, though, appears to be phonologically defying the conventions of lyrical performance which have been held, to a greater or lesser extent, since rock ‘n’ roll's emergence in Australia. This paper examines this interesting sociolinguistic phenomenon by providing a picture of phonological variation within youth music in Australia, enabling a comparison between Hip Hop and other genres. It argues that performance accent is closely tied to several factors, including cultural identity and genre appropriateness. In the case of Hip Hop, a local identity is maintained linguistically, in keeping with Hip Hop's philosophy of keepin’ it real, suggesting that the genre is simultaneously loyal to and distinct from its American origins. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of languages in the Northern Territory are unusual amongst Australian Aboriginal languages in showing contrasts between two types of stops, the mon salient feature of which is apparently duration of constriction. After placing the present work in context through discussion of analyses of neighbouring languages, this paper reconsiders the contrast in Jawoyn. Examination of the phonetic features that are correlated with the contrast indicate that not only duration of constriction, but also voicing through the closed phase and voice onset rime play a role in its realization. Consideration is then given to the possible phonological analyses of this contrast. .Three types of analysts, prosodic, segmental and geminate, are discussed, and while a prosodic interpretation of the Jawoyn data appears untenable, there is no clear evidence to indicate that either a segmental or geminate phonological analysis is more appropriate. Rather, it is argued that the evidence is `indeterminate' at the phonological level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on Australian English, as on new varieties of English generally, has been concerned with these questions: (i) where did the input come from, especially from which region in Great Britain and Ireland; (ii) when did the English transplanted acquire distinct features; and (iii) what was the formative role of social or other layers of the population in stratifying the new variety? However, research assumes without much discussion that new varieties of English can be explained as a local process away from a set of transplanted varieties of English and that they are, possibly, enriched by the effects of language contact in the country. This paper reviews Mitchell's ideas on the history of Australian English critically, enlarges the perspective to the dialect and contact and makes some quite radical revisions. I will propose that Australian English has undergone, at least, two processes of transplantation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The social history of a language or variety, and its emergence, consolidation and stabiliza tion, allow us to combine the formal data of the language (principally its sound structure, grammar and lexis) with the external conditions in which they have evolved. The advance of Australian English in terms of its differentiation (Kloss's abstand ) and elaboration of roles (Kloss's ausbau ) pose problems of chronology, periodization, description and expla nation. This paper extends the conventional scope of abstand and ausbau to the analysis of the social history of Australian English. It argues that two factors are central to the emerging identification of Australian English: creativity, in the sense of morphological innovation, especially here in diminutives like reffo ('refugee') and pollie ('politician'); and in ludicity, defined as a deep-rooted playfulness with language. While these character istics are only part of the overall dynamics of the social history of Australian English, the evidence is sufficiently extensive to warrant further investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A.G. Mitchell takes the view that in the creation of both Broad Australian and General Australian a process of levelling of dialects took place, and the major dialects were those of south-east England. But why is it that in the lexicon of Australian English there seem to be words from a vast range of dialects? And why is it that the most significant dialect borrowings do not occur in the early years of settlement? This paper takes words of dialect origin and examines them by topic, region of origin and period of adoption into Australian use. The findings suggest that there is some correlation between the patterns of migration from particular dialect areas and the appearance in Australian English of words from those dialect areas, but that overall the pattern of lexical borrowings from dialects is indeed contrary to the pronunciation evidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Court reports from cases heard mainly at the Sydney Police Office in the mid-nineteenth century were taken down and published around 1850 in two Sydney newspapers, The Empire and Bell's Life in Sydney, by the newspaper reporter Charles Adam Corbyn, and republished in 1970 by Cyril Pearl. The aim of this paper is to see to what extent these texts can throw light on the various Englishes spoken in Sydney at the time, including London English, American English and Chinese Pidgin English, among others. Corbyn`s reports give a good indication of the varieties in use but are less helpful in identifying features of a non-standard Australian English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we propose a new model for the analysis of complex word forms in Australian languages. We propose that complex words should be categorized in terms of their phonological patternings. We show that complex words exhibit two distinct types of phonological patternings. One type of complex word shows the same patterns as simplex words. We call morphological relations within this type of word, root-level relations. In the other type of complex word, at least one constituent itself has the characteristics of a simplex word. We call morphological relations within this type of word, word-level relations. We demonstrate that the distinction between root-level and word-level relations has clear correlates in morphological productivity. Our model provides a straightforward account of the relationship between phonology and morphology in complex words. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the use of Australianisms by Western Australian primary school students. A selected set of lexical items from Bryant (1989a) were used in the study. Results showed less use of some items deemed to be indicative of Western Australia by Bryant and some infiltration of terms from the eastern states, clearly caused by internal migration. Other changes could be attributed to changes in Australian lifestyles generally and American television. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the discourse quotatives of Australian English (AE) found in sociolinguistic interviews with adolescents. The investigation focuses on a description of the types and linguistic conditioning of the discourse quotatives and a documentation of the discourse meanings and contexts of their realization. Results indicate that the innovation be + like is located in the discourse quotative system of AE but faces opposition from go, say and the null/zero (Mathis & Yule 1994) form. A comparative analysis of AE with North American, Canadian and British English shows that go and null/zero discourse quotatives are prominent in the data, realized with minimal tense variation, i.e. the Historical Present (HP) dominates. Further, the trajectory of be + like in the AE data confounds the typical accessibility pattern for grammatical person. The form has a relatively limited distribution but appears to be grammaticalized for the third person. Analysis of the discourse context highlights the saliency of oppositional experiences, i.e. 'me and them' tales including voices expressing solidarity with the teller's position. The HP successfully captures both meanings—the enduring ongoing voices of 'others' and the chorus of support from their peers. These meanings effectively exclude the innovation be + like. The AE adolescents appear to be embracing the be + like innovation but its implementation in the system is constrained by the discourse role of the voices, expression of solidarity and the continuing 'other', and the propinquity of null/zero forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jiwarli is an Australian Aboriginal language that was formerly spoken in the north-west of Western Australia. It shows a high degree of (suffixing) morphological complexity, has a split-ergative case-marking system, and a switch-reference system in dependent clause linkage. Verbs are also strictly subcategorized for transitivity and there are interactions between clause type and case marking. A prevalent feature of Jiwarli discourse is the non-occurrence of overt arguments in both main and dependent clauses. In narratives, 65–75% of transitive clauses have at least one missing argument (depending on genre), with 20% consisting of just a verb alone. Also, 25% of intransitive clauses lack their single (intransitive subject) argument. Zero arguments in Jiwarli can have either unspecified reference or else be anaphoric. This paper discusses the occurrence of zero arguments and outlines the means by which anaphoric relations are expressed. I will show that there is an interaction between verb transitivity, clause type, switch-reference, and the case-marking system which assists with reference determination in narrative discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes and discusses the use of the present perfect in Australian English which, when compared to uses in other varieties of English, is found in a broader range of contexts. Examination of data collected mainly from radio news programs and chat shows reveals that the present perfect in Australian English is used: (1) in combination with past temporal adverbials; (2) in sequences indicating narrative progression; (3) in alternation with the simple past and the present tense to express stylistic contrast. All these uses are common in our sample, which seems to indicate that the category is undergoing an extension of its meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information about several papers discussed at the AIATSISResearch Seminar Series, held at Canberra, Australia in 2011 is presented. Topics include Indigenous language interpreting, bilingual education and official uses of Indigenous languages. The seminar featured several officials including Sarah Cutfield.

This paper describes the rationale for collection, digitisation, and quantitative characterization of a large multispeaker database of spoken Australian English. The speakers, all of whom were born in Australia of Australian parents, were recorded on 10 occasions over a period of months with each speaker recording a variety of speaking styles on each occasion. (Contains 27 references.) (JL)

This paper defines the South-East (SE) region, one of the lexical usage regions of Australian English. This region covers Victoria, part of South Australia, and the Riverina area of New South Wales. Extensive data is provided in maps of the continent. (Contains three references.) (JL)