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Linguistic and cultural diversity is a feature of most, if not all, modern societies, whether it results from historical processes of state formation, from the aggregation of colonial possessions a...

This paper examines the development of the First Language Maintenance and Development (FLMD) program in South Australia. This program is the main language policy activity that specifically focuses on language maintenance in government primary schools and has existed since 1986. During this time, the program has evolved largely as the result of ad hoc changes, often resulting from decisions made outside the immediate scope of language maintenance provisions. The program was initially introduced as a general reform of language education in primary schools but eventually became a program focused specifically on language maintenance. The paper traces the ways that ad hoc changes have shaped the program, and how these have shaped the program over time. As a result of these changes over time, first language maintenance has moved from being an integrated focus within core language policy to being a peripheral language policy activity. As a result, although the FLMD represents an aspect of South Australia’s language policy, it does not have either a clear position within that policy nor does it have a clearly developed focus of its own Refereed/Peer-reviewed

Some languages code that an action was performed unintentionally using evidentials, which in other contexts indicate a speaker’s source of information. Evidentials are only used for indicating nonvolitionality when an action was carried out by the speaker in the past. The evidential marker may carry a quite different meaning in coding nonvolitionality, this may be an extension of its primary meaning, or it may simply be a pragmatic interpretation of the use of a particular evidential in first person contexts. A nonvolitional interpretation can arise with nonvisual evidentials, visual or direct evidentials, inferential evidentials, and nonwitnessed, nonfirsthand or indirect evidentials.

The use of the expression gay and lesbian in a corpus of televised spoken Australian English is examined. It is shown that speakers treat this as a lexicalized expression, rather than a productively created conjunct of gay and lesbian . The meaning of the whole expression is not predictable from the meaning of the parts, in that gay and lesbian is used to refer to a broader set of people than the sets covered by the terms gay and lesbian individually. Gay and lesbian is also used in reference to a single non-specific individual, where a disjunct phrase with or would normally be appropriate. Additional support for the lexicalized status of this expression comes from the occasional use of gay and lesbians, with a single marker of plurality on what appears to be a conjoined noun phrase.

Although the importance of using students' home languages in education has been recognised for many years, home languages that are not official languages often struggle to find space in school curricula. This paper examines the ways that language-in-education policies influence the space available for non-official languages in the curriculum. It begins with a brief overview of the historical context that shapes how languages are understood in education. It then presents a critical review of some policies that allocate space to students' home language in the curriculum in order to examine certain ways that such policies both allow and constrain that space. It examines contexts that exemplify some of the key issues which students' home languages confront in educational settings, whether they are present as official languages or non-official languages, as a medium of instruction or a class subject. It then identifies some of the factors that contribute to the marginalisation of students' home languages in educational policy and practice. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

Donohue's (1998) recent unarticle developed an Optimality Theory analysis of the verb prefix ordering of the general tense form of Maung, a non‐Pama Nyungan language of northern Australia. However,...

La linguistique historique repose sur l'utilisation de sources. Dans la reconstruction de l'histoire des langues, les donnees les plus anciennes sont evidemment les plus recherchees. Mais cela pose parfois certains problemes, que l'A. examine ici, apportant des corrections a une classification erronee de certaines langues equatoriales et colombiennes

This paper on Spanish for Science and Technology (SST) analyzes the rhetorical functions carried out by the selection of voice — active, passive or se-passive — in five biological research articles in Spanish. It compares these rhetorical functions with those found in French and English scientific papers. Finally it suggests that there may be some universals which can be established on the basis of this comparison, but only through the introduction of an intermediate level of “discourse function” between the levels of rhetorical function and the level of grammatical form.

This paper examines the semantics of two Spanish causative constructions ‐ the hacer‐plus‐infinitive construction and the hacer‐plus‐subjunctive construction using Natural Semantic Metalanguage to describe the semantic invariants of these two constructions. The analysis is limited to sentences which have animate causers. From the analysis of such sentences, it can be demonstrated that the two constructions have similar but distinct meanings. The hacer‐plus‐subjunctive construction encodes some idea of intentionality which is absent from the hacer‐plus‐infinitive construction. Where the construction with the subjunctive is used, the action involved is often (though not always) indirect, or mediated, rather than direct, in which case the infinitive is usually (but not always) used.

Linguistics is the study of language, and for most non-linguists (including linguistics students), language is about communication. This paper examines the use of the terms communication, communicating and communicative in introductory linguistics texts to uncover the underlying assumptions about communication which they encapsulate. There are, in fact, relatively few mentions of communication in these introductory texts, and possible reasons for this are also examined.