This issue of the Australian Journal of Linguistics, which features articles that are part of the "Tense, Aspect, Modality and Evidentiality in Australian Aboriginal Languages" (TAMEAL) project, is ...introduced. Adapted from the source document
This paper considers possible diachronic explanations for the range of case marking patterns found in subordinate clauses in languages of the Pilbara region of Western Australia. There are two ...parameters to consider in comparing patterns across the area. First, complements and adjuncts of verbs in dependent clauses may have patterns of case marking different from those of independent finite clauses. Second, nominal suffixes functioning as complementizing case may occur either just on the verb of the dependent clause or on all subconstituents of the dependent clause. Two possible paths of development for subordinate clauses are described. Some dependent clauses arise out of nominalizations through the instantiation of a nominalized verb's argument structure and in languages with a high degree of multiple case marking it follows naturally that in such clauses complementizing case would be distributed to all subconstituents. Other dependent clause types arise through changes in which main clause adjuncts of different kinds are reanalyzed as arguments of a nominalized verb. The recognition of these different sources explains a range of complex patterns of case marking choice in subordinate clauses and provides an account of the distribution of complementizing case in different construction types and in different languages.
Catching Language Ameka, Felix K; Dench, Alan; Evans, Nicholas
2008, 2006, 2006-01-01, Letnik:
167
eBook
"Descriptive grammars are our main vehicle for documenting and analysing the linguistic structure of the world's 6,000 languages. They bring together, in one place, a coherent treatment of how the ...whole language works, and therefore form the primary source of information on a given language, consulted by a wide range of users: areal specialists, typologists, theoreticians of any part of language (syntax, morphology, phonology, historical linguistics etc.), and members of the speech communities concerned. The writing of a descriptive grammar is a major intellectual challenge, that calls on the grammarian to balance a respect for the language's distinctive genius with an awareness of how other languages work, to combine rigour with readability, to depict structural regularities while respecting a corpus of real material, and to represent something of the native speaker's competence while recognising the variation inherent in any speech community. Despite a recent surge of awareness of the need to document little-known languages, there is no book that focusses on the manifold issues that face the author of a descriptive grammar. This volume brings together contributors who approach the problem from a range of angles. Most have written descriptive grammars themselves, but others represent different types of reader. Among the topics they address are: overall issues of grammar design, the complementary roles of outsider and native speaker grammarians, the balance between grammar and lexicon, cross-linguistic comparability, the role of explanation in grammatical description, the interplay of theory and a range of fieldwork methods in language description, the challenges of describing languages in their cultural and historical context, and the tensions between linguistic particularity, established practice of particular schools of linguistic description and the need for a universally commensurable analytic framework. This book will renew the field of grammaticography, addressing a multiple readership of descriptive linguists, typologists, and formal linguists, by bringing together a range of distinguished practitioners from around the world to address these questions."
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.
The clitic -rru in Panyjima, glossed as 'now' by Dench, appears not only in present tense but also in past and future clauses. This paper analyses the uses of this clitic and its interactions with ...tenses at clause level, as well as its role in the wider discourse context. We argue that -rru has temporal and contrastive properties, more specifically that -rru modifies the time of the eventuality denoted and signals a change: it introduces a contrast with an earlier state of affairs corresponding to the negation of the eventuality denoted. Thus temporal progression is also inferred. We propose to represent this contrast as a presupposition that -rru introduces, using Discourse Representation Theory (DRT). We also show that in discourse, -rru is used to introduce new subtopics, thus expressing contrasts at this wider level as well. Discourse relations and their temporal inferences are analysed using Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT). We conclude that, while -rru often corresponds to the adverb 'then' in English, its contrastive properties liken it more to the adverb 'now' in other languages, especially when the latter is used in non-present time contexts.
Catching Language Felix K. Ameka, Alan Dench, Nicholas Evans / Felix K. Ameka, Alan Dench, Nicholas Evans
2008
eBook
Descriptive grammars are our main vehicle for documenting and analysing the linguistic structure of the world's 6, 000 languages. They bring together, in one place, a coherent treatment of how the ...whole language works, and therefore form the primary source of information on a given language, consulted by a wide range of users: areal specialists, typologists, theoreticians of any part of language (syntax, morphology, phonology, historical linguistics etc.), and members of the speech communities concerned. The writing of a descriptive grammar is a major intellectual challenge, that calls on the grammarian to balance a respect for the language's distinctive genius with an awareness of how other languages work, to combine rigour with readability, to depict structural regularities while respecting a corpus of real material, and to represent something of the native speaker's competence while recognising the variation inherent in any speech community. Despite a recent surge of awareness of the need to document little-known languages, there is no book that focusses on the manifold issues that face the author of a descriptive grammar. This volume brings together contributors who approach the problem from a range of angles. Most have written descriptive grammars themselves, but others represent different types of reader. Among the topics they address are: overall issues of grammar design, the complementary roles of outsider and native speaker grammarians, the balance between grammar and lexicon, cross-linguistic comparability, the role of explanation in grammatical description, the interplay of theory and a range of fieldwork methods in language description, the challenges of describing languages in their cultural and historical context, and the tensions between linguistic particularity, established practice of particular schools of linguistic description and the need for a universally commensurable analytic framework. This book will renew the field of grammaticography, addressing a multiple readership of descriptive linguists, typologists, and formal linguists, by bringing together a range of distinguished practitioners from around the world to address these questions.
This paper presents a detailed account of the changes affecting pronoun paradigms in a sample of thirteen languages of the Pilbara region of Western Australia. The reconstruction demonstrates a ...number of interesting diachronic trends including analogical levelling, the loss and later reintroduction of inclusive/exclusive person categories and the waxing and waning of nominative/ergative case syncretisms. In addition, it appears that many of the changes are the result of pattern diffusion. Taken together, the changes detailed in this study present a rich catalogue of the kinds of changes which can be expected to have occurred in the development of Australian languages more generally.
A unified description of the functions of case-marking morphemes in Australian languages is developed. It is shown that these morphemes may operate at several syntactic levels, eg, relating nominals ...to other nominals or relating clauses to other clauses in complex predicates. This in turn implies the possibility of multiple case-marking, which in fact is frequently observed in Australian languages. A general typology of case functions is outlined. Adnominal, referential, complementizer, & associating case functions are described in detail. Conventions governing the ordering & extent of case-marking in various languages are described. It is suggested that data like those presented here may bear on the issue of whether a strict separation of morphology & syntax is appropriate in linguistic description. 1 Table, 64 References. B. Annesser Murray
