Among Geoff O'Grady 's most important contributions to the field is the central place he has give... more Among Geoff O'Grady 's most important contributions to the field is the central place he has given to "the tangled web which Pama-Nyungan diachronic semantics-let alone Australian diachronic semantics !-promises to be" (O'Grady 1979: 129). Within the broad enterprise of comparative Australian linguistics, O'Grady's work towards the grand vision of an eventual etymological dictionary of Pama-Nyungan has thrown up, time and again, fascinating hypotheses into semantic connections. Some, such as the link between 'egg' and 'brain', have been the subject of article-length treatments (O'Grady 1990c). Others have been sprinkled like diamond dust through the preliminary etymological entries published in various places, and especially those gathered in O'Grady and Tryon (1990). As but a single example of the genre, consider the fo llowing extracts from entry P56, pPN *palya l N 'fat, grease' (O'Grady 1990b:23 1). My own hypotheses on the semantic connections are in square brackets, with all other comments being O'Grady's, and I have reordered his entry to bring out what I believe to be the approximate lines of semantic development. PIT palyi N 'fat', NYA paja.rli W 'fat, dripping', S 'fat, grease' (with dissimilation from *palya.riI) , GUP boy 'yellow, FATTY part of crab' [O'Grady cites some parallels of GUP oy reflecting ancestral alya] , PIN palya 'good ... pleasing' [a number of languages and special registers illustrate a connection between 'fat' and 'good', reflecting the treasured position of fatty fo ods in the traditional Australian diet; here consider, for example, Kaurna marni 'good, fat, rich' (Amery & Simpson 1994: 1 64), and the Lardil initiation register Demiin, in which l*i paraphrases yaka 'fish', luwa 'fat, grease' and kuba 'good' (Hale et al. 198 1)]; WLB palya 'wax-from spinifex; native adze' [by synecdoche, from the use of spinifex wax in hafting the blade; the link of 'wax' to 'fat, grease' was probably r would like to thank the fo llowing people for data, comments, and stimulating discussions of these problems. Firstly, the late Darwin Moodoonuthi (Kayardild), Minnie Alderson (Gun-djeihmi), Big Bill Namunjdja Murrbburnkurla (Kunrayek dialect of Mayali), David Kalbumi (Dangbon, Kune dialect of Mayali) for their perceptive instruction in their own languages. Secondly,
Las construcciones diádicas denotan pares o grupos unidos por relaciones sociales del tipo ‘(par ... more Las construcciones diádicas denotan pares o grupos unidos por relaciones sociales del tipo ‘(par de) hermanos/vecinos’, ‘padre e hijo’. Pueden estar formadas por derivación morfológica, ser raíces léxicas inanalizables o sintagmas. Hasta hace poco tiempo este fenómeno había escapado a una sistematización tipológica y la información disponible sugiere una distribución geográfica altamente sesgada, con la mayoría de ocurrencias en el Pacífico Occidental e instancias esporádicas en Africa, Eurasia occidental o América. El artículo revela la existencia de una construcción diádica robusta y productiva en mapudungun (mapuche o araucano), lengua hablada en el sur de Chile y Argentina. Examina algunos rasgos tipológicos de la construcción diádica mapuche sobre la base de nuevos datos primarios que,o bien se desvían de lo documentado hasta ahora o exhiben efectos semánticos interesantes aún no registrados: la posibilidad de formar verbos denominales causativos recíprocos y construcciones pos...
In insubordination (Evans 2007), erstwhile subordinate clauses get reanalysed as main clauses. Ex... more In insubordination (Evans 2007), erstwhile subordinate clauses get reanalysed as main clauses. Examples of the phenomenon from English, German, Japanese and Kayardild, include: (1) If you could just sit here for a while, please. [Free-standing conditional, functioning as request] (2) Ob wir richtig sind? '[It's possible/I doubt/you were wondering (etc.)] whether we're right?' [Free-standing 'whether' clause, representing imputed question/position] (3) あれを見て! Areo mite! Look at that! [Free-standing chained-form verb functioning as informal imperative] (4) Kajakaja-ntha dali-jurrk? daddy-Complementizing.oblique comeImmediate:Complementizing.oblique '(Have you seen / do you know) whether/that daddy has arrived?'
The Antipodean linguistics community lost one of its most versatile, productive, and humane membe... more The Antipodean linguistics community lost one of its most versatile, productive, and humane members this January with the unexpected death of Terry Crowley, professor of linguistics at Waikato University in Hamilton, New Zealand, at the early age of 51. The 21 books and over 70 journal articles he produced include grammars of seven languages from two language families (Australian, Oceanic/Austronesian) and two English-based Pacific creoles (Bislama, the main lingua franca of Vanuatu, and Cape York creole, of Queensland), all based on his own fieldwork, dictionaries, textbooks in both historical and descriptive linguistics, and a recent book on the typology of serial verbs in Oceanic languages, in addition to numerous articles. His work in descriptive typology was thus given an extraordinary breadth by being embedded in a range of activities that included long-term fieldwork, contributions to the development and codification of one of the few creoles to be adopted as a national language (Bislama), and the training of students in descriptive and historical work, particularly of students from Pacific nations who were often the first generation of their culture to receive higher education. Born in Billericay, Essex on April 1, 1953, Terry emigrated with his family to Australia where he went to a rural school near Shepparton, Victoria.
Southern New Guinea languages possess unusual senary systems, used for yam-counting. This article... more Southern New Guinea languages possess unusual senary systems, used for yam-counting. This article demonstrates the common presence of cognate base-6 numeral systems with monomorphemic power terms up to 6 6 , with attestation across the major branches of the Morehead-Upper Maro group. Kanum, related to the Morehead-Upper Maro family, has cognate forms but with ambiguity between the readings 6n and 'numeral in nth senary cycle', while Agöb in the neighbouring Pahoturi family has recently borrowed the senary power numerals. Evidence is presented for convergent cultural factors that would have selected for the emergence of a base-6 numeral system, including the six-petal arrangement in which they are laid out in piles and other aspects of ceremonial counting routines.
Radiocarbon dates from three Kaiadilt Aboriginal sites on the South Wellesley Islands, southern G... more Radiocarbon dates from three Kaiadilt Aboriginal sites on the South Wellesley Islands, southern Gulf of Carpentaria, demonstrate occupation dating to c.1600 years ago. These results are at odds with published linguistic models for colonisation of the South Wellesley archipelago suggesting initial occupation in the last 1000 years, but are consonant with archaeological evidence for post-4200 BP occupation of islands across northern Australia, particularly in the last 2000 years.
This article appeared in a journal published by Elsevier. The attached copy is furnished to the a... more This article appeared in a journal published by Elsevier. The attached copy is furnished to the author for internal non-commercial research and education use, including for instruction at the authors institution and sharing with colleagues. Other uses, including reproduction and distribution, or selling or licensing copies, or posting to personal, institutional or third party websites are prohibited. In most cases authors are permitted to post their version of the article (e.g. in Word or Tex form) to their personal website or institutional repository. Authors requiring further information regarding Elsevier's archiving and manuscript policies are encouraged to visit: http://www.elsevier.com/copyright
AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY 1. See Newman (2002) for an excellent cross-linguistic survey of p... more AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY 1. See Newman (2002) for an excellent cross-linguistic survey of posture verbs. However, this source does not investigate the much larger systems of the type discussed here. 'hanging from something', yerarengar 'resting in a fork (of a tree), yedarengar 'drain lying on the earth'. Ongoing eldwork by Jeff Siegel on Nama, Christian Döhler on Kómnzo, and the present author on Nä, suggest sets of roughly comparable size in these three languages, all fellow members of the Morehead-Maro family. 3. Data presented here were gathered over six eldtrips, totaling eighteen weeks, in 2008-2013. For nancial support during both eldwork and analysis phases, I thank the Australian National University (Professorial Setup Grant), the Australian Research Council (Discovery Project "Languages of Southern New Guinea," ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language), and the Volkswagen Foundation's DoBeS program (Project: "Nen and Tonda"). I would especially thank my Nen teachers, in particular Jimmy Nébni, Michael Binzawa, and †Aramang Wlila, as well as the whole village of Bimadbn for its hospitality, friendship, and great interest in linguistic matters.
How should grammars handle construction types which are statistically rare and may be difficult t... more How should grammars handle construction types which are statistically rare and may be difficult to identify, but exhibit significant morphosyntactic and semantic complexity? What is the likelihood that distinctive and typologically interesting constructions of this type might be missed altogether, even in high-quality reference grammars? And when they are described, how thoroughly do reference grammars explore the parameters of the phenomenon-morphosyntactic, semantic, and lexicaland their interaction? Can typologically and formally-based approaches assist writers of descriptive grammars to give more insightful and comprehensive accounts? I examine these questions with respect to reciprocal constructions, which are statistically rare (on all counts occurring in under 1% of clauses in natural text) but which in many languages represent a highly complex part of the grammar. I will particularly focus on a number of case studies where I can compare high-quality reference grammars with additional typologically-driven investigations.
Earlier impressionistic analyses of Dalabon indicate that the grammatical word is often realized ... more Earlier impressionistic analyses of Dalabon indicate that the grammatical word is often realized as either an accentual phrase, or an intonational phrase, followed by a pause. Unusually, it can also be interrupted by a silent pause, with each section being realized as separate intonational phrases. Our results support these earlier impressions, although this use of the silent pause appears to be restricted to certain affix boundaries, and other phonological constraints relating to the following linguistic material.
In this paper I describe a number of agreement-type phenomena in the Australian language Kayardil... more In this paper I describe a number of agreement-type phenomena in the Australian language Kayardild, and assess them against existing definitions stating both the boundaries of what is to be considered agreement, and characteristics of prototypical agreement phenomena. Though conforming, prima facie, to definitions of agreement that stress semantically-based covariance in inflections on different words, the Kayardild phenomena considered here pose a number of challenges to accepted views of agreement: the rich possibilities for stacking case-like agreement inflections emanating from different syntactic levels, the fact that inflections resulting from agreement may change the word class of their host, and the semantic categories involved, in particular tense/aspect/mood, which has been claimed not to be an agreement category on nominals. Two types of inflection, in particular-'modal case' and 'associating case'-lie somewhere between prototypical agreement and prototypical government. Like agreement, and unlike government, they are triggered by inflectional rather than lexical features of the head, and appear on more than one constituent; like government, but unlike agreement, the semantic categories on head and dependent are not isomorphic. Other types of inflection, though unusual in the categories involved, the possibility of recursion, and their effects on the host's word-class, are close to prototypical in terms in how they fare in Corbett's proposed tests for canonical agreement. Note to typesetters: (a) I don't have access to the hachek symbol, which needs to be used several places over the c in the name Mel'cuk instead of the c. At each relevant place I have written [insert hachek] after the letter c.
We describe a structured task for gathering enriched language data for descriptive, comparative, ... more We describe a structured task for gathering enriched language data for descriptive, comparative, and documentary purposes, focusing on the domain of social cognition. The task involves collaborative narrative problem-solving and retelling by a pair or small group ...
This article examines the interactions between reduplication, sound change, and borrowing, as pla... more This article examines the interactions between reduplication, sound change, and borrowing, as played out in the Iwaidja language of Cobourg Peninsula, Arnhem Land, in Northern Australia, a non-Pama-Nyungan language of the Iwaidjan family. While Iwaidja traditionally makes use of (various types of) right-reduplication, contact with two other left-reduplicating languages-one Australian (Bininj Gun-wok) and one Austronesian (Makassarese)-has led to the introduction of several (non-productive) left-reduplicating patterns. At the same time as these new patterns have been entering the language, the cumulative effect of sweeping sound changes within Iwaidja has complicated the transparency of reduplicative outputs. This has left the language with an extremely varied and complicated set of reduplication types, for some of which the analysis is no longer synchronically recoverable by children.
This article uses instrumental data from natural speech to examine the phenomenon of pause placem... more This article uses instrumental data from natural speech to examine the phenomenon of pause placement within the verbal word in Dalabon, a polysynthetic Australian language of Arnhem Land. Though the phenomenon is incipient and in two sample texts occurs in only around 4% of verbs, there are clear possibilities for interrupting the grammatical word by pause after the pronominal prefix and some associated material at the left edge, though these within-word pauses are significantly shorter, on average, than those between words. Within-word pause placement is not random, but is restricted to certain a‰x boundaries; it requires that the paused-after material be at least dimoraic, and that the remaining material in the verbal word be at least disyllabic. Bininj Gun-wok, another polysynthetic language closely related to Dalabon, does not allow pauses to interrupt the verbal word, and the Dalabon development appears to be tied up with certain morphological innovations that have increased the proportion of closed syllables in the pronominal prefix zone of the verb. Though only incipient and not yet phonologized, pause placement in Dalabon verbs suggests a phonologydriven route by which polysynthetic languages may ultimately become less morphologically complex by fracturing into smaller units.
Mundari, an Austroasiatic language of India (Munda family), has often been cited as an example of... more Mundari, an Austroasiatic language of India (Munda family), has often been cited as an example of a language without word classes, where a single word can function as noun, verb, adjective, etc. according to the context. These claims, originating in a 1903 grammar by the missionary John Hoffmann, have recently been repeated uncritically by a number of typologists. In this article we review the evidence for word class fluidity, on the basis of a careful analysis of Hoffmann's corpus as well as substantial new data, including a large lexical sample at two levels of detail. We argue that in fact Mundari does have clearly definable word classes, with distinct open classes of verb and noun, in addition to a closed adjective class, though there are productive possibilities for using all as predicates. Along the way, we elaborate a series of criteria that would need to be met before any language could seriously be claimed to lack a noun-verb distinction: most importantly strict compositionality, bidirectional flexibility, and exhaustiveness through the lexicon.
Mayali has four genders and five morphological classes, with formal identity between the gender p... more Mayali has four genders and five morphological classes, with formal identity between the gender prefixes and four of the morphological class prefixes. Gender and morphological class are assigned according to different but largely overlapping semantic principles. We analyze these partially overlapping systems within the NETWORK MORPHOLOGY framework; an implemented model demonstrates that the analysis gives the correct forms for the majority of nouns in a basic lexicon, and further extends to understanding assignment in the avoidance register. Our account depends on recognizing two different types of default: NORMAL CASE DEFAULT, the expected outcome in a given domain, and EXCEPTIONAL CASE DEFAULT, the last resort short of full lexical specification.* * The research reported here was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (UK) under grant number R000238228. This support is gratefully acknowledged. Evans would further like to thank the Australian Research Council (grants Polysemy and Semantic Change in Australian Languages and Reference Grammar of Mayali: Cross-dialectal materials), as well as the Humboldt Foundation, for supporting his fieldwork and writing up of the Mayali material. We thank Toby Gangele, Eddie Hardy, David Karlbuma, Ruby Ngalmindadjek, Mick Kubarkku and Big Bill Birriya-birriya for furnishing information on Mayali, and Ken Hale and Murray Garde for generously making available their lexical files, and Murray Garde a second time for checking out some of the gender assignments in the field. Versions of this work were presented at the ESRC seminar Challenges in
Our response takes advantage of the wide-ranging commentary to clarify some aspects of our origin... more Our response takes advantage of the wide-ranging commentary to clarify some aspects of our original proposal and augment others. We argue against the generative critics of our coevolutionary program for the language sciences, defend the use of close-to-surface models as minimizing cross-linguistic data distortion, and stress the growing role of stochastic simulations in making generalized historical accounts testable. These methods lead the search for general principles away from idealized representations and towards selective processes. Putting cultural evolution central in understanding language diversity makes learning fundamental in the cognition of language: increasingly powerful models of general learning, paired with channelled caregiver input, seem set to manage language acquisition without recourse to any innate “universal grammar.” Understanding why human language has no clear parallels in the animal world requires a cross-species perspective: crucial ingredients are vocal...
Though it draws on the grammatical metaphor of person (first, third, second) in terms of represen... more Though it draws on the grammatical metaphor of person (first, third, second) in terms of representations, Schilbach et al.'s target article does not consider an orthogonal line of evidence for the centrality of interaction to social cognition: the many grammatical phenomena, some widespread cross-linguistically and some only being discovered, which are geared to supporting real-time interaction. My commentary reviews these, and the contribution linguistic evidence can make to a fuller account of social cognition.
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