Abstracts

Allan, Keith

The best architect designed this church: definite descriptions in Default Semantics

I will begin with a very brief description of the aspects of default semantics relevant to the paper.  Chapter 4 of Kasia Jaszczolt’s Default Semantics (Jaszczolt 2005) examines the default semantic analysis of 1, uttered when standing in front of the Sagrada Família in Barcelona.

          1. The best architect designed this church.

At first sight, Jaszczolt’s conclusion that the cognitive default reading of 1 is “Antoni Gaudí designed Sagrada Família” looks right, I would guess that this is exactly what you and I would normally understand by such an utterance. But is it in fact an appropriate semantic analysis, even given Jaszczolt’s pragmatics-rich approach?

Jaszczolt does test her assumptions against both speaker and hearer ignorance of the true architect of Sagrada Família, and also of the utterance being made while the speaker ‘points at one of the houses in Parc Güell’ also designed by Gaudí. In such cases as these Jaszczolt claims a non-default interpretation of 1 – though I would claim that referring to a house in Parc Güell as ‘this church’ is an infelicitous use of language, which is a different kettle of fish from the speaker or hearer ignorance of the true architect of Sagrada Família. If ‘this church’ in 1 directly refers to something that is literally or figuratively a church, then 1 is felicitous and, under the conditions described above 1, the utterance refers to whomever it is that the speaker believes to be the architect of Sagrada Família, whether speaker knows that s/he is referring to Gaudí, or mistakenly believes it to be Simon Guggenheim, or is using the definite description attributively to refer to whoever it might have been who designed the church. Whereas I think there are good grounds (following in the footsteps of Grice and many others) for assuming that, by default, 1 expresses the true opinion of the speaker that the architect of Sagrada Família is the (world’s, Spain’s, Catalonia’s) best architect we cannot safely assume that the speaker, qua speaker, knows that architect’s identity. Our knowledge of what the particular speaker is likely to know is our only guide here. We will make different assumptions for the speaker who is a four-year old child, George W Bush, or a native of Barcelona (etc.). The same goes for the addressee: an adult addressing a four-year old child will very likely follow up 1 by identifying the architect.

Consider the meaning of 1 uttered when standing alongside the Sydney Opera House. It is plausible as a figurative use of ‘this church’, and also to attribute superlative design to the architect, which in this case would turn out to be referring, knowingly or not, to Jorn Utzen. We only know whether speaker and hearer correctly identify the architect from the co-text of 1, and so I don’t think Jaszczolt’s assumption that there is a cognitive default reference to Antoni Gaudí through the definite description ‘the best architect’ in 1 is correct without considerably more input from context than she allows. It seems rather to be an interpretation deriving from what she calls ‘conscious pragmatic inference’.

Jaszczolt, Katarzyna M. 2005. Default Semantics: Foundations of a Compositional Theory of Acts of Communication. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Alpher, Barry, Claire Bowern & Geoffrey O’Grady

The Genealogical Classification of the Western Torres Strait Language

We present evidence for classing the Western Torres Strait (WTS) language as Pama-Nyungan, with a complex history of contact with both neighboring Pama-Nyungan languages and unrelated (“Papuan”) languages. Some of the recent literature regarding language contact contains emphatically stated claims that the Australian situation is exceptional, and indeed, in the case of Torres Strait, that the determination of linguistic relatedness is impossible (e.g. Dixon 2002:130).

The Western Torres Strait dialect chain, although classed as Pama-Nyungan from the earliest work (and implicitly but clearly in the work that preceded the coining of the term “Pama-Nyungan”), has recently been claimed not to be Australian at all. In this paper we review the evidence for the genetic status of WTS and conclude with comments on the methodological implications of diffusionist views applied indiscrimately. We stress the importance of the study of WTS in the PN context because of its almost unique status as a language not geographically contiguous with other members of the family.

Evidence for the genetic affiliation of WTS includes:

• Regular reflexes of core (and non-core) vocabulary

• Regular reflexes of pronouns, complete with suppletive paradigms

• Reflexes of nominal and verbal morphology

• Fossilized PN suffixes otherwise lost in WTS

Items which confuse the picture include:

• Extensive loans from neighboring languages, including Uradhi and Meryam.

• Multiple correspondences (e.g. Pama-Nyungan initial stops sometimes reflected as voiced, sometimes as voiceless)

• Presumed substrate effects from “Papuan”

Keywords: Australian languages, Pama-Nyungan, historical linguistics

Dixon, RMW 2002: Australian languages: their nature and development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Amha, Azeb

Governing case and number realizations: the role of definiteness and specificity in Wolaitta grammar.

In Wolaitta, an Omotic language spoken in south-west Ethiopia, identification of a referent as an earlier mentioned, specific and/or known participant in discourse affects morphological marking of some grammatical categories such as case, gender and number. The case marking system is nominative-accusative; A(gent) and S(ubject) are marked by the nominative case; O(bject) which mainly designates the patient or affected entity in a transitive clause, is marked by the accusative case. The nominative case is morphologically marked both on definite and indefinite nouns but the morphemes that are used to mark case in these two types of nouns are different. In the accusative, definite nouns are morphologically marked for case whereas indefinite nouns occur in their basic (unmarked or dictionary entry) form.

Another category that interacts with definiteness is number marking. Morphological number marking is obligatory for definite/referential nouns whereas a syntactic means is preferred to express plurality of indefinite nouns. That is, morphologically marked plural nouns are generally interpreted as definite. Indefinite plurals are expressed by a combination of a numeral or a quantifier (e.g. dáro ‘many’, c’óra ‘several’) and a singular or plural noun.

Asano, Yuko

Semantic analysis of tag questions in Japanese: daroo and janai ka

This paper discusses the meanings of two Japanese expressions which are used in ‘requiring confirmation’: daroo and janai ka, together with a comparison of the sentence- final particles ne and yone. These words are often interpreted as the tag questions, don’t you think?, or right? in English, used in similar situations. Although these expressions are semantically closely related, they are not always interchangeable, and the subtle differences are difficult to capture especially for language learners. While ne and yone can be used in talking to someone who is older or socially higher than the speaker, daroo and  janai ka have a pragmatic restriction and their use is permitted only among  interlocutors who are close or in a casual situation.This paper adopts the Natural  Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach developed by Anna Wierzbicka and others (see  especially Goddard and Wierzbicka 1994, 2002), and proposes new explications in terms  of semantic primitives. The proposed explications illustrate that the sentence-final particles such as ne and yone focus on what the speaker or hearer knows, whereas daroo and janai ka mainly deal with how the speaker thinks about the proposition. The analysis reveals the semantics and the pragmatic usage of these expressions, which offer better understanding of epistemic aspects in Japanese.

Keywords: daroo, janai ka, ‘requiring confirmation’, Natural Semantic Metalanguage, semantic primitives

Goddard, Cliff and Anna Wierzbicka (eds). 1994.  Semantic and Lexical Universals — Theory and Empirical Findings. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Goddard, Cliff and Anna Wierzbicka (eds). 2002.  Meaning and Universal Grammar — Theory and Empirical Findings. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Berghout, Anita

Language Issues in the Dutch Migrant Community in the 21^st Century

This paper primarily discusses the current situation of language-loss among bilinguals and the related socio-linguistic implications in the ageing Dutch migrant community in Australia, and secondly identifies some attitudinal changes in recent Dutch migrants towards language maintenance. The population of first-generation Dutch descent is the third largest Non-English Speaking Background (NESB) group in the over-55 age-range in Australia (ABS, 2001; Clyne, 2005). In Newcastle during the last decade, there has been an increase in the number of calls from the Hunter Area Migrant Health Interpreter Service for Dutch interpreters to assist with the typically older generation of Dutch migrants. This has also been noted elsewhere, as it is identified as a serious issue amongst older-generation Dutch migrants in Melbourne (Minkjan, 2007). As such, it appears that an increasing number of first-generation Dutch-background people are lapsing back into using Dutch or have returned to significant levels of code-switching between Dutch and English. There is evidence that this kind of language-shift typically occurs as a result of age-related dementia or strokes. Frequently, partners and/or children are English-speaking only and this raises various language-related difficulties within the social circles of older Dutch migrants.   Second, there is currently an interesting increase in Dutch language maintenance among more recent Dutch migrants in Australia and among second-generation Dutch Australians.  For instance, a few years ago a Dutch-language primary school was established in Sydney and in various regions in Australia there are more Dutch language classes occurring than there have been in previous decades.  The socio-linguistics of the revival of Dutch among first and second generation migrants will be discussed in this paper.

Key words: Code-switching; Dutch language use; Language loss; Migrant language revival.

Australian Bureau of Statistics (2001). Australian Census Data: 2001 Census. Canberra: ABS/AGPS.

Clyne, M. (2005) Australia’s Language Potential.  Sydney: University of New South Wales Press Ltd.

Minkjan, M. (2007) “Dementie treft niet alleen degene bij wie de ziekte is vastgesteld” (“Dementia does not only affect those who are diagnosed with the condition”). Dutch Courier, February 2007, p. 24.

Bowern, Claire

Australian Models of language spread

Australian historical linguistics has been haunted by difficulties in the reconstruction of Proto-Pama-Nyungan. Estimates of the family’s age vary wildly (from 4000BP to more than 40,000BP), and new theories of change have been developed to account for the current distribution of languages.

Here I outline a reconstruction model with a case study from the Karnic subgroup of Pama-Nyungan. I work within a model that is similar to Ross’ (1997) speech community networks, and argue that the Comparative Method can be used to reconstruct isogloss networks as well as neatly bifurcating trees (contra Dixon 2002). Such networks can be modeled on “rakes”, such as Ross’, or on reticulate networks, such as those used here.

There are several important implications. First, the unit of input to the tree is simultaneously the speech community and the “lect”; these two entities do not map directly to one another in most pre-European Australian societies. Thus this is not solely a linguistic model of change. Secondly, in a model such as this the concept of “contact-induced change” is potentially highly problematic. At that level, all change is contact-induced, in that it is spread through a speech community network which may or may not involve multiple “languages”. It remains to be seen whether this is a desirable consequence of the model. Importantly, however, such a model accurately and realistically models a family where linguistic diversification has primarily occurred while speakers of different geographical lects have remained in contact with one another.

Keywords: Historical linguistics, Australian languages, subgrouping

Dixon, RMW (2002). Australian languages: their nature and development. CUP

Ross,Malcolm. 1997. “Social networks and kinds of speech-community events”. In: Blench, Roger; and Spriggs, Matthew (eds.), Archaeology and language I: Theoretical and methodological orientations, 209–61.London: Routledge.

Burridge, Kate

’Cos it’s exciting

The variation in constituent order is the most exciting aspect of weil clauses signalling reason in Pennsylvania German. Order fluctuates between verb-final or near verb-final (the so-called subordinate clause order), as in (1), and verb-second, seen in (2), which mirrors the order in main clauses, as in (3).

1          Sel       dut       nett      vebrenne          [weil         es         plastic  is].
            that      does     not       burn                    because    it          plastic  is

2          Sel       dut       nett      vebrenne          [weil          es         is          plastic].
            That     does     not       burn                    because    it          is          plastic
            ‘That doesn’t burn because it’s plastic’

3          Es        is          plastic.
            it          is          plastic
            ‘It’s plastic’

Modern Continental German shows a similar alternation, although only the version matching (1) is considered the standard or ‘correct’ one. Some recent accounts explain the variation in terms of a change underway in German, whereby weil is shifting from a hypotactic to a paratactic conjunction.

I argue that, far from being innovative, the alternation shown by (1) and (2) is a relic. The different constituent orders are motivated by clear pragmatic factors that have always been present in the language. Verb-final order occurs in weil clauses that contain given, presupposed information, while clauses with verb-second contain exciting, new, highlighted, unpredictable information. Furthermore, in contrast to the verb-final weil clauses, verb-second weil clauses carry a much weaker causal sense, expressing simply a logical relationship between the clauses with very little sense of cause or reason. I will also argue that this is precisely the relationship that distinguishes Modern English (linking) ‘cos clauses from because clauses (reminiscent of for versus because in earlier English).

This distinction between ‘real’ and ‘ideal’ cause has always been important for Germanic. The fact that it continues to be signalled by variation in constituent order in Pennsylvania German, and that where this variation has (largely) been lost in closely related languages innovative forms are now used, shows that linguistic functions can be maintained or reinvented, even in the absence of formal similarity.

Keywords: Pennsylvania German, syntax, subordination, constituent order

Caldwell, David

Attitude in ‘Popular’ North American Hip-Hop

For more than a decade, hip-hop culture and rap music has been the object of considerable academic inquiry.  Scholars working in literacy education for example argue that “whether the power in its messages can be used for good or ill, few can dispute the impact of Hip-Hop culture on the lives of working class urban youth” (Morrell and Duncan-Andrade 2002: 89).

This paper presents a preliminary multimodal analysis of several mainstream, ‘popular’ American hip-hop songs.  From Systemic Functional Linguistics, the lyrics are analysed for interpersonal meanings at the level of discourse semantics using appraisal (Martin and White 2005).  The analysis of music will focus exclusively on the synthesized instrumental support accompanying the lyrics.  Following the work of van Leeuwen (1999), sound resources such as melody, pitch and tempo are understood as ‘sound acts’ that have the ‘meaning potential’ to realise particular emotions or affect.  This paper will investigate the interaction between expressions of affect as realised in both linguistic and musical form.

The ultimate aim of this research is to complement the many critiques of popular music and hip-hop culture by describing the rhetorical ‘power’ of those hip-hop songs that are ‘used for good’; songs that empower listeners through messages that seek to make the world a better place.

Martin, J.R. and White, P.R.R. 2005. The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Morrell, E. and Duncan-Andrade, M.R. 2002: Promoting Academic Literacy with Urban Youth through Engaging with Hip-hop Culture. English Journal July: 88-92.

van Leeuwen, T. 1999. Speech, Music, Sound. London: Macmillan.

Cash Cash, Phil

Documenting Language, Visualizing Culture: Shooting Digital Video in Two Endangered Language Communities in Western North America (Plenary)

Nez Perce and Sahaptin, two severely endangered sister languages in the southern Columbia Plateau of western North America (USA), are currently spoken by only 1% of the total indigenous population. The impact of language shift in these two speech communities is leading to the loss of dialectical and cultural diversity and ultimately to the loss of the languages themselves. Despite 70 years of modern language documentation and description, an audio-visual record depicting naturally occurring speaker interactions and communicative events for these two languages does not exist. A timely and urgent need exists to capture on digital video the naturally occurring speech of the few remaining fluent Nez Perce and Sahaptin speakers before their languages "fade away". This language documentation project, carried out in 2006-2007, addresses this urgent need. This paper summarizes my initial findings as well as reviewing my attempts to create a comprehensive record of the linguistic practices from these two speech communities using digital video technologies. It also examines the need to develop an expanded research paradigm where collecting audio-visual data is an essential component to any language documentation project.

Chen, Yi-Ting & Yi-An Lin

When Amis meets the Inner Aspect Model

Amis is one of the indigenous languages of Taiwan, belonging to the Formosan group of Austronesian languages. Almost every Amis verb is affixed with a voice marker; for example, according to Wu (2000), ma- is one of the undergoer voice markers but it can be actor voice in some cases, and mi- is an actor voice marker. Until now, researchers have found that in Amis the voice marker is related to the noun phrase (NP) that receives nominative case and that voice-marked verbs can be further classified into different verb classes. For instance, Wu (2005) indicates that the case assignment pattern will be NOM-DAT if the ma-verb has the meaning of BECOME, but if not, the case assignment will change to GEN-NOM. While Wu indicates that there are two verb classes, nevertheless, she does not provide a clear answer to the question: why is the logical structure connected with the case assignment? Therefore, in order to understand the connection between the logical structure and the case assignment, we turn to another approach, namely the Inner Aspect model proposed by Travis (2006), and claim that the correlation between the voice marker and the case assignment, in Amis, can be accounted for in terms of Travis’s Inner Aspect model.

Within the Inner Aspect framework, Travis (2006) argues that within vP there is an additional functional projection in which Aktionsart or aspectual verb classes are realized and that the case variation is “derived by the changes in inner aspect” (p. 18).  According to this approach, the [±process] feature and lexical causative are accommodated in the functional head v, whereas the [±telic] or [±definite] feature is accommodated in the functional head Inner Aspect (Asp). V is the verb root, and it attains all these features on its way up to v. The different values of the features determine the lexical aspect and the transitivity of the verb. Furthermore, the case assignment is also determined by the different values of these features.

Given the facts that the undergoer voice marker, ma-, is encoded with a telic feature (Wu, 2005) and that the [±complete] feature also differentiates the actor from the undergoer voice (extended from Tsukida, 1993), it is reasonable to assume that voice markers are encoded with lexical aspects.

 If we assume that voice markers are the carriers of the features, then the case assignment is necessarily related to the verb class. In addition, the derivation of mi-patay ‘kill’ (cause to die) from ma-patay ‘die’ (become dead) implies that there might be a null v with a [±causative] feature (Travis, 2006). Take mi-patay and ma-patay as an illustration: if Asp is [-telic] and v is [+causative], v will introduce an agent in its specifier position and the verb mi-patay will assign the accusative case to the object NP (theme). In addition, the agent NP will be assigned a nominative case by T. On the other hand, if the Asp is [+telic] and v is [-causative], the verb is spelled out as ma-patay, and no agent NP will be introduced. The theme NP will then remain in situ, receiving a nominative case from T. As shown above, this paper will prove that the Inner Aspect model can give an explanation for the correspondence between the case assignment and the verb class in Amis.

 Keywords: Amis, Aktionsart, Inner Aspect

Travis, L. (2006). Inner Aspect: The Articulation of VP. Manuscript.

Tsukida, Naomi. (1993). The use of -en form in Fataan-Amis.  Asiaan and African Linguistics 22:123-40.

Wu, J. (2000). A Reference Grammar in Amis. Taipei: Yuan-Liu Publisher.

Wu, J. (2005). Ma-verbs in Amis: A role and reference grammar analysis. Retrieved from http://linguistics.buffalo.edu/research/rrg/Wu-RRG05.pdf  1/24/07.

Tsukida, Naomi. (1993). The use of -en form in Fataan-Amis.  Asiaan and African Linguistics 22:123-40.

Cleary-Kemp, Jessica

Definiteness marking in Saliba

Saliba, an Oceanic language of Papua New Guinea, has two noun phrase (NP) markers — ne and wa — that speakers typically translate with a definite article. In addition, the language has a third NP marker — hesau(na) — that speakers tend to translate with an indefinite article. None of these markers is obligatory in any context, and bare lexical NPs (those that do not contain one of these markers) are interpreted as either definite or indefinite, depending on context. Like similar "article-like" elements in some other Austronesian languages (e.g. Ambonese Malay ni and tu: Van Minde 1997), their grammatical status, and the difference in their meaning and function, is not well understood. This paper draws on a corpus of narrative and non-narrative spoken texts in order to better understand speakers' motivation for choosing between these devices.

Margetts (1999) tentatively describes ne, wa and hesau(na) as "specific", "given" and "indefinite" markers respectively, but there has been no systematic study of their use. Here I closely examine their distribution in terms of specificity, givenness and definiteness, and suggest that the labels "specific" for ne and "given" for wa are not entirely accurate. Rather than marking specific NPs, ne occurs with referents that are at least "uniquely identifiable" on Gundel, Hedberg and Zacharski's (1993) Givenness Hierarchy. The same status is both necessary and sufficient for reference with a definite article NP in English, and therefore ne is conveniently labelled "definite". Wa on the other hand, more than simply marking givenness, overwhelmingly occurs with referents that are either "textually evoked" or "textually inferable" according to a modified version of Prince's (1981) taxonomy of Assumed Familiarity. This suggests that wa is an "anaphoric" marker that indicates a referent is identifiable from the preceding discourse, rather than from general knowledge or external context. Moreover, wa is most likely to occur with referents whose "continuity of identity" (Du Bois 1980) is maximally salient, such as characters in a narrative.This suggests that wa is what Fox (1984) terms a "tracker": an article-like element whose primary function is to trace the identity of discourse participants.

Du Bois, John W. 1980. Beyond definiteness: The trace of identity in discourse. In The pear stories: Cognitive, cultural, and linguistic aspects of narrative production, edited by Wallace L. Chafe, 203-74. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Fox, Barbara. 1984. Participant tracking in Toba Batak. In Studies in the structure of Toba Batak, edited by Paul Schachter, 59-79. Los Angeles: University of California.
Gundel, Jeanette K., Nancy Hedberg, and Ron Zacharski. 1993. Cognitive status and the form of referring expressions in discourse. Language 69(2): 274-307.
Margetts, Anna. 1999. Valence and transitivity in Saliba, an Oceanic language of Papua New Guinea. PhD dissertation, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen.
van Minde, Don. 1997. Malayu Ambong: Ponology, morphology, syntax. Leiden: Research School CNWS.
Prince, Ellen F. 1981. Toward a taxonomy of given-new information. In Radical pragmatics, edited by Peter Cole, 223-56. New York: Academic Press.

Collins, Peter

The progressive aspect in Australian, British and American English

The progressive aspect has undergone substantial growth in Late Modern English (as shown for example by Aitchison 1991:100). Not only has there been an ongoing increase in the frequency of progressives in general, but also the establishment of the progressive in a few remaining niches of the verbal paradigm in which it was not current until the twentieth century (e.g. the progressive passive as in dinner was being prepared, superseding the ‘passival’ dinner was preparing). According to Hundt (1998: 75), Australian and NZ English are more advanced than American and British English in the frequency increase in the use of the progressive. However Hundt’s study was limited to written corpus data and, as she candidly acknowledges, further study is needed.

The present paper reports a study which was both significantly larger than Hundt’s (based on a set of standard parallel one-million-word corpora comprising both spoken and written text categories, and available through the International Corpus of English). The distribution and frequency of the progressive are compared not only across the three World Englishes selected but also across the spoken and written registers of the corpora. The findings provide insights into the issue of whether the rise of the progressive is to be interpreted as an instance of grammatical change, or as a grammatical symptom of a more general stylistic change in which the norms of written English have moved closer to spoken usage (via ‘colloquialisation’: see, e.g., Biber et al. 1999: 461-3).

Keywords: progressive, English, corpus, speech, writing

Aitchison, J. 1991. Language  change: progress or decay? Cambridge: CUP.

Biber, D., S. Johansson, G. Leech, S. Conrad, and E. Finegan. 1999. Longman grammar of spoken and written English. London: Longman.

Hundt, M. 1998. New Zealand English grammar: fact or fiction? Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Crain, Stephen

Definiteness and strong determiners in child language

In English, one diagnostic for classifying determiners as strong or weak is the definiteness effect, i.e., the observation that strong determiners (e.g., the, every) are not tolerated in existential constructions (there-sentences) (Milsark 1977). According to Heim (1991) strong determiners are ununacceptable in this linguistic environment because they carry a presupposition of existence, and existential constructions assert the information that strong determiners presuppose, resulting in a pragmatic clash (cf. Barwise and Cooper 1981, Zucchi 1992).

(1)  There is a man in the garden.
(2)  *There is the/every man in the garden.

A related phenomenon is the interpretation of have-sentences, as illustrated in (3) and (4) (Iatridou 1995).

(3)  Grover has a car (that Tommy fixed).
(4)  Grover has the/every car (that Tommy).

Sentence (3) is ambiguous. It can have a possession reading (Grover owns a car) and a custodial reading (Grover has temporary custody of a car). By contrast, (4) only has a custodial reading. Thus, the interpretation of have-sentences also distinguishes between strong and weak determiners, where the presuppositional force of strong determiners prevents them from appearing in have-sentences, just as in there-sentences (cf. Belin and den Dikken 1997).  The research question for the present study was whether children know the interpretive difference between weak and strong determiners in have-sentence like (3) and (4). If so, children should be credited with knowing the distinction between strong and weak determiners, and specifically about the presuppositional force of the and every.

Recently, it has been claimed that children’s well known non-adult responses to sentences with the universal quantifier, dating back to Inhelder and Piaget (1964), are the product of a non-canonical mapping between syntax and semantics (Drozd 2006; Geurts 2003). On one account, by Geurts (2003), the so-called mapping problem attributes children’s non-adult responses to a failure to distinguish between strong and weak determiners. To evaluate this account, we conducted two studies of children’s interpretation of sentences like (3) versus (4), one study with the, and one with every. Both studies used a Truth Value Judgment task (Crain and Thornton 1998). On a typical trial, one character, Big Bird say, was given (by Tommy) temporary custody of a/every car that belonged to Grover. In such a condition, 3- to 5-year-old children (n = 30) accepted sentences like (3) 88% of the time, but the same children rejected sentences like (4) 90% of the time with the definite determiner, the, and another group of children (n = 15) rejected sentences 88% of the time with the universal quantifier, every.  Children motivated their rejections in both cases by saying that Big Bird had the/every car, but it/they belonged to Grover. These findings are taken as evidence that, by three, children know the presuppositional force of strong determiners, which is a prerequisite for the distinction between strong and weak determiners. The findings are in line with other evidence of children’s adult understanding of sentences with the universal quantifier in certain experimental contexts, and they are consistent with a non-linguistic account of children’s behavior in tasks that evoke non-adult responses (e.g., Crain et al. 1996).

Barwise, John and Robin Cooper. 1981. “Generalized quantifiers and natural language.” Linguistics and Philosophy 4, 159-219.
Belin, Robert and Marcel den Dikken. 1997. “There happens to be have.” Lingua 101, 151-183.
Crain, Stephen, and Rosalind Thornton. 1998. Investigations in universal grammar: A guide to experiments in the acquisition of syntax and semantics, Cambridge, MA, The MIT Press.
Crain, Stephen, Rosalind Thornton, Carol Boster, Laura Conway, Diane Lillo-Martin, and Elaine Woodams. 1996. “Quantification without qualification.” Language Acquisition 5, 83-153.
Drozd, Ken. 2006, “The effect of context in children's interpretations of universally-quantified sentences.” In Semantics in Acquisition, 115-140, Veerle van Geenhoven (Ed.), Dordrecht: Springer,
Geurts, Bart. 2003. “Quantifying kids”. Language Acquisition 11, 197-218.
Heim, Irene. 1991. “Artikel und Definitheit.” In Semantik. Ein internationales Handbuch der zeitgenössischen Forschung, 487-535, Arnim. von Stechow and D. Wunderlich (Eds.), Berlin: de Gruyter.
Iatridou, Sabine. 1995. “To Have and Have not: on the Deconstruction Approach.” Proceedings of the Fourteenth West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, 185-201.
Inhelder, Barbel and Jean Piaget. 1964. The early growth of logic in the child. London: Routledge, Kegan and Paul.
Milsark, Gary. 1977. “Toward an Explanation of the Peculiarities of the Existential Construction in English.” Linguistic Analysis, 3: 1-29.
Zucchi, Alessandro. 1992 “Existential sentences and predication.” In P. Dekker e M. Stokhof, editors, Proceedings of the Eighth Amsterdam Colloquium.

Crain, Stephen & Rosalind Thornton

Logic and Universal Grammar

A series of universal principles are proposed, involving the interpretation of disjunction in human languages. Consider the statement in (1). Here the clause that contains disjunction, Max order sushi or pasta, is embedded in the clause that contains negation, Sue didn’t see …. Semantically, the critical observation is that (1) generates a conjunctive entailment: Sue didn’t see Max order sushi and Sue didn’t see Max order pasta. Based on cross-linguistic research, it appears that conjunctive entailments are licensed in all languages in statements where disjunction appears in a lower clause than negation. This yields (A). (cf. 2002). A second universal concerns the interpretation of disjunction in sentences with focus operators: English (only), Japanese (dake, shika –nai), and Chinese (dou, zhiyou). Sentences with focus operators expresses two propositions: the presupposition and the assertion, as illustrated in (2)^. Sentences with focus operators can be further partitioned into (a) a focus element and (b) a contrast set. The presupposition describes the focus element. For most speakers, there is an implicature of exclusivity for disjunction (‘not both’) in the presupposition. The assertion is about the contrast set. It entails that members of the contrast set lack the property being attributed to the focus element. The critical point is that disjunction generates a conjunctive entailment in the assertion (see 2b). The same conjunctive entailment is generated in sentences with focus operators across languages, yielding (B) (Goro, Minai and Crain 2005).   The third universal principle governs sentences with downward entailing expressionsThe subject phrase of a sentence with the universal quantifier in pre-subject position is downward entailing, as illustrated in (3). Based on cross-linguistic research, we propose that disjunction licenses a conjunctive entailment in statements that contain downward entailing expressions. For example, (4) shows that English or generates a conjunctive entailment in the subject phrase of a sentence with the universal quantifier every in pre-subject position. In cross-linguistic work we find the same patterns to be exhibited in Japanese and Chinese, and all other languages as far as we know. This yields the putative universal (C) (cf. Chierchia 2004). (A)-(C) all suppose that disjunction is inclusive-or in human languages, hence a fourth principle is proposed, (D).

            (1)  Sue didn’t see Max order sushi or pasta.

            (2) Only Brian ordered sushi or pasta.

                        a) Presupposition: Brian ordered sushi or pasta (but not both).

                        b) Everyone else (being contrasted with Brian) did not order sushi,

                                    and everyone else did not order pasta.

            (3)         Every student who speaks a Romance language likes to travel.

                        Þ every student who speaks French likes to travel

            (4)        Every student who speaks French or Spanish likes to travel.

                        Þ every student who speaks French likes to travel  and

                             every student who speaks Spanish likes to travel

Summary: Disjunction generates a conjunctive entailment: (A) when it appears in a lower clause than negation; (B) in the assertion of certain focus expressions; (C) in the scope of downward entailing expressions; and (D) Disjunction is inclusive-or in human languages and in classical logic.

Chierchia, G.  (2004). Scalar implicatures, polarity phenomena, and the syntax/pragmatics interface.  In A. Belleti and L. Rizzi (eds) Structures and Beyond. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Goro, T., U. Minai and S. Crain (2005) Two disjunctions for the price of only one. Proceedings of the 27^th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, Summerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.

Szabolcsi, A. (2002) Hungarian Disjunctions and Positive Polarity. In I. Kenesei and P. Siptar eds., Approaches to Hungarian 8. Budapest: Akademiai Kiado.

Curnow, Timothy Jowan & Catherine E. Travis

Locational adverbs in non-spatial settings: The case of ahí in Colombian Spanish conversation

The Spanish ‘locational’ adverb system consists of five terms: aquí, acá, allí, allá, ahí. These are traditionally divided into two sets, those ending in i and those ending in a. They are often analyzed as consisting of terms indicating location close to speaker (aquí, acá), close to hearer (ahí), and distant from both (allí, allá) or two proximate, one medial and two distal locational terms (e.g. Butt & Benjamin 2000:421f; Solé & Solé 1977:350f). However, it has been suggested that, at least in some varieties of Spanish, the distinction between ahí and allí is not necessarily one of distance, but rather relates to semantic, pragmatic and sociolinguistic factors (Sacks 1987; Sedano 1999), with a concomitant restructuring of the deictic system from a three term to a two term system, following a pattern that has been witnessed in most Romance languages.

An analysis of the use of the locational adverbs in a corpus of conversational Colombian Spanish reveals that ahí is overwhelmingly the most frequent term, occurring close to 300 times. It is found that the distance distinction between ahí and allí is no longer the driving force in the use of ahí in Colombian Spanish, and that ahí has generalized in meaning such that while it can be used in contexts where allí could also be used, it is used in a range of other contexts, many of them non-spatial. Furthermore, when it does occur with a spatial sense, rather than expressing the expected mid-distance meaning, it expresses a more general notion of distance.  Its uses outside the locative realm include as a temporal, causal and manner adverb, in addition to being used as a pragmatic particle expressing speaker attitude (in particular with negative evaluations).

Shifts from spatial to non-spatial meanings have, of course, been widely observed cross-linguistically, and described in various theoretical frameworks; and indeed the non-spatial use of the Spanish locational system has been discussed before, as noted above.  However unlike the present study, such discussions are seldom based on contextually rich conversational data (cf. Enfield 2003), allowing us to observe how the locational adverbs are actually used by speakers of the modern language, and in particular to see that not only is the adverb ahí seldom used in a locational sense, it never has the ‘expected’ medial meaning when it is used spatially.  We further discuss the cross-linguistic implications of the fact that only the medial term in the Spanish system has shifted to non-spatial uses, with the distal locational term allí being used only for spatial reference in our data.

Keywords:  Spanish, spatial adverbs, locational adverbs, semantics

Butt, John & Carmen Benjamin (2000). A new reference grammar of modern Spanish (3rd ed.). London: Edward Arnold Publishers.

Sacks, Norman P. (1987). An analysis of Hispanic adverbs of place beyond the rest/motion distinction: Sound symbolism, relativity of focus, and correspondences to English there. In T. Morgan (ed), Languages and language use: Studies in Spanish. Lanham, MD: Ann Arbor. pp 289-315.

Sedano, Mercedes (1999). ¿Ahí o allí? Un estudio sociolingüístico. In María José Serrano (ed), Estudios de la variación sintáctica. Madrid: Iberoamericana. pp 51-63.

Solé, Yolanda & Carlos Solé (1977). Modern Spanish syntax: A study in contrast. Lexington: D.C. Heath and Company.

de Sousa, Hilário

Vanuatu Echo-Subject prefixes — Switch-Reference or something else?

Languages in various parts of Vanuatu (Southern Vanuatu (e.g. Lynch 1983), South Efate (Thieberger 2006) and some languages in Malakula, e.g. Aulua (Paviour-Smith forthcoming)) are described as having echo-subject (ES) markers or something similar.  Canonically, an ES prefix is used in place of a normal cross-reference prefix when the subject of a clause is coreferential with the subject of the preceding clause.  The use of an ES prefix contrasts with the use of a normal cross-reference prefix, which — in some Vanuatu languages — obligatorily indicates disjoint-reference between the same pair of interclausal references.  This is reminiscent of the switch-reference (SR) affixes found in — e.g. — Australian and Papuan languages.  In this paper we will summarise the similarities and differences amongst the ES systems, and argue that ES is fundamentally different from SR: canonical SR has the semantic function of reference tracking and the discourse function of indicating participant continuity versus discontinuity (de Sousa 2006), whereas ES is only used for reference tracking.                                                                                                                              

Keywords: Vanuatu languages, Echo-Subject, Switch-Reference, reference tracking, participant continuity, discourse continuity

de Sousa, Hilário.  2006.  What is Switch-Reference? — From the Viewpoint of the Young People’s Switch-Reference System in Menggwa Dla.  Te Reo (49): 39-71.

Haima, John & Pamela Munro (eds.).  1983.  Switch-reference and Universal Grammar — Typological Studies in Language.  Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Lynch, John.  1983.  Switch-Reference in Lenakel.  In Haiman, John & Pamela Munro (eds.): 209-221.

Paviour-Smith, Martin.  forthcoming.  A grammar of the Aulua language of South East Malakula.

Thieberger, Nick.  2006.  A Grammar of South Efate.  Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

Donohue, Mark

The sounds of Sahul

Sahul, the prehistoric continent that contained what is now Australia, New Guinea, and parts of eastern Indonesia, split up 8,000 years ago (eg. Allen et al 1977, White and O'Connell 1983, Mulvaney and Kamminga 1999), and according to all the evidence, involving the distribution of known or supposed families and the radically differing typological profiles of those families, we have was linguistically diverse long before that (Nichols 1992, 1995, 1997; for methodologies, see work on areal and contact linguistics, such as  Sandfeld 1930, Jakobson 1931/1962, Weinreich 1953/1963, Masica 1976, Emeneau 1980, Thomason and Kaufman 1988, and recently Campbell 2006, amongst others).

Nonetheless, there are a number of reasons to treat Sahul as a single area, or a zone with a single series of clines between areas, when examining the phonologies of languages in the area (Maddieson 2006). For instance, rather than showing two different patterns for voicing contrasts or the presence of fricatives, both Australia and New Guinea show a tendency to lack voicing contrasts, and to have an atypical (or absent) fricative system, both of which go against global trends, and which unite these two regions together. This is striking, in light of the fact that morphosyntactically a large number of grammatical features separate the two areas, or show similar clines in different ranges (Nichols 1992, 1993, Wurm et al 1975).

In this talk I present preliminary results of a survey of segments and segment contrasts in the languages of Sahul, pointing out common tendencies found in the phonologies of languages from a range of different families that point to ancient phonological 'hotspots' for the development of some of the particular traits that we observe today.

Keywords: phonology, typology, Australia, New Guinea, areal linguistics, prehistory, historical

Allen, J., J. Golson and R. Jones, eds. 1977. Sunda and Sahul: Prehistoric studies in Southeast Asia, Melanesia and Australia. London: Academic Press.

Campbell, Lyle. 2006. Areal Linguistics: A Closer Scrutiny. In Linguistic Areas: Convergence in Historical and Typological Perspective, eds. Yaron Matras, April McMahon and Nigel Vincent, 1-31. Houndsmill: Palgrave.

Emeneau, Murray B. 1980. Language and Linguistic Areas: Essays. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Jakobson, Roman. 1931/1962. Über die phonologischen Sprachbünde. In Selected writings, ed. Roman Jakobson, 137-143. The Hague: Mouton.

Maddieson, Ian. 2006. Areal and typological patterns in the phonology of the languages of Oceania. Paper presented to the 32nd Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society.

Masica, Colin P. 1976. Defining a Linguistic Area: South Asia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Mulvaney, John, and Johan Kamminga. 1999. The prehistory of Australia. Smithsonian.

Nichols, Johanna. 1992. Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

         1995.  The spread of language around the Pacific Rim.  Evolutionary Anthropology  3:6.206-15.

         1997.  Sprung from two common sources: Sahul as a linguistic area. In Patrick McConvell and Nicholas Evans, eds., Archaeology and linguistics: Aboriginal Australia in global perspective. Melbourne: Oxford University Press.

Sandfeld, Kristian. 1930. Linguistique balkanique: Problèmes et resultats. Paris: Edouard Champion.

Thomason, Sarah Grey, and Kaufman, Terrence S. 1988. Language contact, creolization, and genetic linguistics. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Weinreich, Uriel. 1953/1963. Languages in contact. New York: Linguistic Circle of New York (Reprint, The Hague: Mouton).

White, Peter, and James O'Connell. 1983. A Prehistory of Australia, New Guinea and Sahul. Academic Press.

Wurm, S.A., Laycock, D.C., and Voorhoeve, C.L. 1975. General Papuan characteristics. In New Guinea area languages and language study Vol. 1: Papuan languages and the New Guinea linguistic scene, ed. S.A. Wurm, 171-189. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics C-38.

Donohue, Mark

Case and configurationality: Scrambling or mapping?

Case-marking nonconfigurational languages such as Warlpiri (Hale 1983, Simpson 1991, Austin and Bresnan 1996) and Jiwarli (Austin 2001), both from Australia, famously allow for discontinuous constituents. Under some approaches to case (see, for instance, Legate 2002) the shared case marking is due to the various constituents having been scrambled out of a base-generated form (licensed by agreement; Jelinek 1984). Under other accounts (eg., Simpson 1991, Andrews 1996) the discontinuous elements are united in functional structure, but a single ‘constituent’ of functional structure maps on to more than one NP-fragment in constituent structure. Strong evidence favouring one approach over the other is hard to come by.

In Kanum, a language of southern New Guinea (Boelaars 1950, Drabbe 1947, 1950) DPs, which have the templatic structure [DP [NP modifiers* N] D], mark case on the final element of the NP, and on the D; note that case cannot appear in the NP except on the final element.

DPs can be non-continguous. In this event the final element of each string representing the case-marked NP receives case marking; note also that, unlike the Australian examples, DPs without overt morphological case cannot scramble. Further, only certain cases allow scrambling: the ergative and the dative, with all oblique cases being found only with contiguous DPs. This suggests particular, and peculiar, properties associated only with the ergative and dative cases, but in fact even the dative cannot always scramble: only a dative that marks a recipient allows scrambling, and a beneficiary marked by the phonologically identical dative cannot scamble. The revised model suggests that grammatical functions, the contrast between terms and non-terms, is also relevant: termhood licenses scrambling, provided the DP has overt case: the overt morphological case is still crucial to the process. This is confirmed when we examine subordinate clauses, in which the dative case -ne assumes an accusative role, and we now find that objects (previously unmarked absolutives) allow scrambling.

The conclusion is that an operation that has been claimed to operate in the syntax of a language, scrambling, is sensitive not only to grammatical function identity, which can be assumed to represent information greater than the word and morpheme level, but also to the morphological presence or absence of overt case. Case cannot be assumed to be the mere phonological spell-out of a structural position, but must be considered to be a separate element of the representation of an argument.

Keywords: morphological case, morphology, syntax, New Guinea, configurationality, grammatical functions

Andrews, Avery D. 1996. Semantic case stacking and inside-out unification. Australian Journal of Linguistics 16: 1-55.

Austin, Peter. 2001. Word order in a free word order language: the case of Jiwarli. In Jane Simpson, David Nash, Mary Laughren, Peter Austin, and Barry Alpher, eds., Forty years on: Ken Hale and Australian languages. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.

Austin, Peter, and Joan Bresnan, 1996. Non-configurationality in Australian Aboriginal languages. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 14: 215-268.

Boelaars, J. H. M.C. 1950. The linguistic position of South-western New Guinea. Leiden: E. J. Brill.

Drabbe, P. 1947. Nota’s over de Jénggalntjoer-taal. Merauke: archief.

Drabbe, P. 1950. Talen en Dialecten van Zuid-West Nieuw-Guinea. Anthropos 45: 545-574.

Hale, Kenneth L. 1983. Warlpiri and the grammar of non-configurational languages. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 1: 5-47.

Jelinek, Eloise. 1984. Empty categories, case, and non-configurationality. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 2: 39-76.

Legate, Julie Anne. 2002. Warlpiri: theoretical implications. PhD thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Simpson, Jane. 1991. Warlpiri morphosyntax: a lexicalist approach. Dordrech: Kluwer.

Donohue, Mark & Kate Burridge

Experiencing English Anew— The grammar of sickness

Morphosyntax experiences breakdowns when it comes in contact with sickness. The small and irregular class of experiencer verbs shows very erratic behaviour, both cross-linguistically and within individual languages.

Modern English has not previously been described as having a distinct class of experiencer verbs, since the loss of case distinctions took with it one of the major and most overt grammatical means of signalling non-volitionality. However, when we examine current-day expressions to do with ill-health and disease, it is readily apparent that these verbs still exhibit a number of eccentric behaviours. In some cases the erratic morphosyntax manifests itself in odd collocations (I've done my back in), but can also involve idiosyncratic argument structures for the verbs (I've slipped a disc, in which slip does not normally allow a postverbal bare NP). There is at least one verb, semantically intransitive but syntactically bivalent, with a pleonastic object  (He carked it), curious behaviour for verbs in English (most other examples of it-objects are at least possibly referential, and can be replaced with expanded NPs, unlike the it associated with cark). The lack of agentivity associated with the subjects of other transitive descriptions of affliction (I’ve caught a cold (*on purpose)) is consonant with the atypical behaviour of these predicates, in which we repeatedly observe a syntactic pattern by which experiential events are coded more transitively than would be predicted from the argument structure alone. Morphologically, expressions for negative experiences frequently show the startling combination of the –er suffix (speaker) and the illness –s (I’ve got the trots) on the one root (She’s bonkers etc.).

The well-documented European predilection for dative subjects is alive (but not well) in English. The peculiar grammar of these constructions maintains the passive role of persons caught up in processes and states beyond their control. Although not as readily identified as in many (if not most) other languages, English expressions of experience are just as quirky.  Here we present a new examination of the data, showing the directions in which more canonical experiential-coding grammar can reinvent itself. This is more than random eccentricity in the language.

Keywords: English, experiencer, dative, morphosyntax

Eades, Diana

Truth and lies: the ideology of inconsistency in the adversarial process

Current sociolinguistic work on linguistic ideologies and the recontextualisation of narratives in the legal process (e.g. Cotterill, Matoesian, Rock and Trinch) is focusing on how the re-telling of stories transforms them – for example from police interview to statement, or from statement to courtroom talk. Some of the questions being asked about this transformation are: what gets left out? what gets changed? what linguistic processes are involved? what are the consequences (does it matter)? Cross-examination makes much of the “ideology of inconsistency” in different re-tellings of an individual’s story: that is, if a witness can’t tell their story in exactly the same way, then there are problems with the witness’s credibility. This “ideology of inconsistency” is at odds with recent sociolinguistic work on conversational story retellings by Schiffrin. Further, in other legal contexts the transformation of an individual’s story is considered unproblematic. My aim in this paper is to expose these contradictory assumptions about story retellings which underlie courtroom talk on the one hand, and policing practices on the other. I will examine this contradiction through two particular case studies – the police interview and corresponding “charge sheet” in the case of a NSW Aboriginal man, and the cross-examination of three teenage Queensland Aboriginal boys. My examination will focus on the linguistic practices involved, the assumptions about how language works which underlie them, and some implications for the delivery of justice.

Keywords: linguistic ideology, recontextualisation, narrative, courtroom talk, police interviews

Edwards, Guy

When agree doesn’t mean agree: Indexicality and stance-taking

Stance, and stance-taking in conversation, has attracted increasing attention from linguists. Stance-taking is the practice of exchanging and co-creating evaluations and attitudes through the positioning of the self and others relative to something mentioned in conversation (the object). Stance is crucially aligned with the notion of indexicality (Du Bois ms.), which describes the capacity of signs to “point to” or “connect to” something in the context of an interaction (Duranti 1997:38). This paper examines the linguistic means used by speakers to take stances in conversation. Recent stance-taking research, in particular by Du Bois (ms) and colleagues (e.g. Karkkaïnen ms, Johnstone ms, in press), establishes that stances are indexed by “overt communicative means” in conversation (Du Bois ms.). Du Bois’ and others’ notion of indexicality is ‘narrow’; a particular sign indexes a stance which is more or less equal to the conventional meaning of that sign. This paper argues that this notion of indexicality must be expanded in order to account for stance in conversation.

Data for this study comes from the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English (Du Bois, Thompson, 2000). Through a close analysis of speaker use of the word ‘agree’ in a multi-party conversation, this paper expands Du Bois’ concept of indexicality and demonstrates the importance of a broader understanding of this term, showing that it is a crucial part of the understanding of stance in conversation. In (1) below Melissa is engaging in a stance act. Specifically, she is responding to a directive from her mother, as given in (2) (“it” refers to Melissa’s homework).

(1)        125.435        MELISSA:      .. Okay,

            125.947                                .. I= retract .. all my arguing.

            127.391                                I totally agree.

            128.183                                I should go downstairs.

 (2)       98.652          JAN:                Take it downstairs.

An immediate interpretation of the above is that Melissa is (as suggested by the conventional meaning of ‘I totally agree. I should go downstairs’) agreeing with her mother’s directive. In terms of ‘meaning’ we can easily parse this utterance; the original proposition with which Melissa agrees is separated by 28 lines of intervening talk, which is perhaps why she restates (“I should go downstairs”), but discerning the meaning of this utterance appears to be a relatively simple matter of tracking anaphoric reference back to Jan’s “Take it downstairs”. Du Bois (ms) makes a claim along similar lines; that Melissa’s stance act in this utterance is agreement (alignment) with her mother’s directive. The simplest, and most critical, point that must be made in relation to this example is that Melissa does not agree with her mother. The transcript of SBC019 is roughly 20 minutes in duration; Melissa’s ‘agreement’ is during the second minute of this conversation. Melissa does not leave the conversation, and is a participating speaker throughout. This, more clearly than any other evidence, demonstrates that Melissa’s stance is not that she should go downstairs, otherwise her physical action would support this. ‘Agree’, in example (1), does not simply mean ‘agree’. Melissa’s stance – her opinion on whether or not she should do downstairs – is not accounted for by Du Bois’ conceptualization of indexicality. A broader conceptualization of indexicality, as put forward in this paper, accounts for examples such as (1) & (2).

Keywords: stance, stance-taking, discourse analysis, indexicality

Du Bois, J., Chafe, W., Meyer, C. & Thompson, S. A. (2000). Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English. Pennsylvania:LDC.

Du Bois, J. (ms) The Stance Triangle

Duranti, A. (1997) Linguistic Anthropology. Cambridge, CUP.

Johnstone, B. (ms). Stance and the linguistic individual: Models of personhood and modes of ethos. Paper presented at American Anthropological Association, November 2002.

Johnstone, B. (in press). Linking identity and dialect through stancetaking. In R. Englebretson (ed.), Stancetaking in interaction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins

Kärkkäinen, E. (ms). Stance-taking in conversation: From subjectivity to intersubjectivity

Engelberg, Stefan

German Colonial Language Politics in Oceania

Paper withdrawn.

Fellbaum Korpi, Marie

The Development of Definiteness/Specificity Structures in Interlanguage

Traditionally second language acquisition studies of definiteness have focused on the development of morphological markers, e.g. definite articles, of the developing interlanguage or syntactic categories of referring expressions, such as pronouns and nouns (Huebner, 1979; Butler 2002, Liu & Gleason 2002). This paper reports on a previously unnoticed behaviour of the structure and function of definiteness/ specificity relations in the developing system of referentiality in Japanese to English interlanguage.

The analysis uses empirical data from a task-based study of 96 spoken dyads of twelve native Japanese learners interacting with eight different partners resulting in twenty four hours of speech. This paper focuses on one learner using two tasks: Task IV, a learner’s description of a photograph of a Japanese festival while a partner tries to guess its identity; Task III, an information gap activity requiring the learner to ask questions to fill in the gaps of a chart about Japanese festivals.

The results show a set of three core semantic definiteness/specificity relations which form a clear pattern of three semantic structures, Existential “There are many people on the street”, Characterizational “Some people has got a light”, and Identity “What is the name of the festival in the fourth blank”.

The formulation of these structures are adaptations and modifications of the semantic theories of Enç (1991) on specificity, Heim’s Familiarity theory of Definiteness (1983, 1988), Kamp’s Discourse Representation Theory (1993), and Thai Identificational and Characterizational sentences (Kuno & Wongthongkong, 1981), and the semantic structures of Jackendoff (1990). Task IV shows evidence of the development of the first two structures proposed, from primarily Existential to exclusively Characterizational structures; no Identity structures were produced. In contrast, in the Information Gap activity, all three are observed. However, the Identity Structures are fewer in number and show the least change in the three week period.

This development suggests that the Identity relation is acquired at different rates semantically from the other two.  In addition, in the latter task, the syntactic predicate is not well-formed in the first two structures initially, but has a complete predicate argument structure by the final week of the study. This development suggests that the semantic structures are acquired at different rates from the corresponding syntactic structures. Thirdly, the two tasks indicate that different discourses are composed of different semantic structures depending on the discourse purpose and function of the referring expressions.

In conclusion, the results of this study provide evidence of the viability of the proposed definiteness/specificity semantic structures for the study of the development of a referential system in interlanguage and its interface with the developing syntax.  It is hypothesized that a similar set of structures can be found in the acquisition of child language referential systems.  Moreover, the proposed semantic definiteness structures which are complementary to but formulated independently of semantic structures based on verbs (Jackendoff 1991) can help explain verbless predicates in natural languages, such as Maori, Sinhala, and Russian (forthcoming, Korpi).

Butler, Yuko Goto.  Second Language Learners’ Theories on the Use of English Articles. Studies in Second Language Acquisition. 24, 451-480.

Enç, M. 1991.  The semantics of specificity.  Linguistic Inquiry. 22: 1-25.

Farkas, D.   2002. Specificity distinctions.  Journal of Semantics, 19, 213-243. 

Heim, Irene.  1983.  File change semantics and the familiarity theory of definiteness.  In Eds. Rainer Bauerle, Christoph  Schwarze, and Arnim von Stechow. Meaning, use and interpretation of language. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

Heim, Irene. 1988. The semantics of definite and indefinite noun phrases.  New York:  Garland Publishing.

Huebner, T. 1983.  A Longitudinal Analysis of the Acquisition of English.  Ann Arbor, Michigan:  Karoma Publishers, Inc.

Jackendoff, Ray. 1991.  Semantic Structures.  Cambridge, Massachusetts:  The MIT Press.

Kamp, H. & Reyle, U. (1993). From Discourse to Logic (Volume1 & 2). Dordrecht:  Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Kuno,  S. & Wongkhomothong, P. (1981). Characterizational and Identificational sentences in Thai.  Studies in Language 5, 65-109.

Liu, Dilin & Gleason, Johanna L. 2002.  Acquisition of the article THE by nonnative speakers of English. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 24, 1-26.

Gardner, Rod & Ilana Mushin

A study of silence in Garrwa mixed language conversation

Ethnographically and anecdotally, it has been claimed that there is a greater tolerance for silence in Aboriginal conversation. Our understanding is that this tolerance extends to very long silences of up to several minutes between adjacent, tied turns (e.g. Walsh, 1995). In this paper we investigate this claim, paying particular attention to silences that occur between speakers’ turns in conversation. In previous work (Gardner & Mushin, under review), we noted that many of the turn-taking practices found in four face-to-face conversations between two elderly Garrwa women in Borroloola, including turn allocation and overlap, showed striking similarities to the practices described for major varieties of English in North America, the UK and Australia. It was also noted that there appeared to be more silences between turns in the Borroloola conversations than in major variety English conversations.

In this paper, we turn our attention to these inter-turn silences. In an expanded data set, which includes an extended conversation between three different elderly Garrwa women recorded in Robinson River, in the Gulf of Carpentaria region of the Northern Territory, we find that medium to long pauses of between half a second and three or four seconds occur much more regularly than in a large corpus of transcriptions of conversations for the three major varieties of English described above, which includes nearly four hours of conversation between seven different Anglo-Australian couples (Gardner, 1995). Interestingly, despite the claims of greater tolerances for lengthy periods of silence in Indigenous talk, we do not find more lapses, i.e. silences of between four or five seconds and up to several minutes, in the Garrwa conversations. We claim that the basic turn-taking rules concerning speaker selection, as described in Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson (1974) are being applied in these conversations. Further, the practices in and of overlapping talk, as described for North American English in Schegloff (2000), insofar as these occur in the conversations examined, are also similar.

Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson (1974) observed, in one of their 14 ‘gross observations’ about conversation, that ‘[t]ransitions (from one turn to a next) with no gap and no overlap are common. Together with transitions characterized by slight gap or slight overlap, they make up the vast majority of transitions.’ It was here we found a major difference, with a large number of transitions occurring with a significant gap of half a second or longer. We explore the nature of these gaps here.

It is one thing to establish a phenomenon such as this, but quite another to explain it. Whether this is a cultural characteristic of these Garrwa women, or of Aboriginal communities in general, or whether this is an artifact of small, isolated communities where everyone knows everyone else, or whether there str other reasons, remains a point for empirical investigation.

Keywords: Conversation Analysis, turn-taking, silence, Australian Aboriginal Languages

Gardner, R. 1995. On some uses of the conversational token mm. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Melbourne.

Gardner, R & Mushin, I (under review). Post-start-up overlap and disattentiveness in talk in a Garrwa Community. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics.

Sacks, H; Schegloff, E; Jefferson, Gail. 1974. A simplest systematics for the organization of turn-taking for conversation.’ Language, 50, 696–735.

Schegloff, E, 2000. ‘Overlapping talk and the organization of turn-taking for conversation’. Language in society, 29, 1–63.

Walsh, M. 1995. ‘Interactional styles in the courtroom: an example from northern Australia.’ In John Gibbons ed. Language and the law. London: Longman.

Giacon, John

A reconstructed grammar of ‘Associated Eating’ in Yuwaalaraay

Verb stems in Yuwaalaraay (YW) can be quite complex, consisting of a root, a number of non-final suffixes and a final tense or mood suffix. Some currently well described non-final suffixes are glossed: ‘all’ or ‘back’, carry information such as associated movement, or specify near or distant time. There is clear evidence of a further non-final suffix, for now glossed ‘Associated Eating’. This paper examines the evidence for the existence and use of the suffix. It also considers how such a suffix might be appropriately used in language revival.

The ‘Associated Eating’ suffix occurs in an example sentence in the notebooks of R H Mathews and in the YW tapes of Fred Reece and Arthur recorded by Janet Mathews and Corrine Williams. The suffix is also common in Wangaaybuwan (Donaldson, 1980), and in another closely related language, Wayilwan. The behaviour of the suffix is resembles that of  the verbal category of ‘Associated Motion’, described by Koch and others, for central Australia languages.

The form of the suffix root, dha-, is identical to that of the verb ‘eat’, but the two are in different verb classes. From the examples found in the YW tapes and with Donaldson’s description of the WN suffix, it is possible to describe rules for some YW uses of the suffix. 

The paper proposes an expanded set of specifications for the ‘Associated Eating’ suffix, which will more fully specify the use of the suffix.  This is necessary for the production of a revival grammar.  A ‘revival grammar’, a grammar that will be useful for language revival, will be different from a purely descriptive grammar in some aspects. Lyons (1968: 159) states: ‘If a linguist knows that his description of a particular language is going to be used only for the analysis of recorded material, he .. can afford to make a less exhaustive classification of the lexicon and less complete grammatical description of the language.’ So, for YW the descriptive grammar will be based on and limited to the historical sources available for YW. Its task is to describe the recorded language. There will be areas where these sources have not captured aspects of the original language, and the descriptive grammar will be silent on these. Language revival can aim to produce a usable, relatively complete language. In that case the role of the production grammar is to specify the necessary rules for the reviving language. This grammar will begin with the historical information, but will also use other relevant information such as the grammars of related languages and general typological principles to expand on the historically available information. While the main focus of the paper is on the actual grammatical feature, it will also briefly examine the differences in a grammar written from a language production perspective. This is particularly relevant for the growing number of grammars being used in language revival.

Keywords: language revival, verbal classification, Australian languages, Yuwaalaraay

Donaldson, Tamsin. 1980. Ngiyambaa, The Language of the Wangaaybuwan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Koch, Harold. 1984. The Category of ‘Associated Motion’ in Kaytej. Language in Central Australia, 1. 23-34.

Lyons, John. 1968. Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics. CUP Cambridge.

Mathews, R. H. Notebook 3 : 62 cited in Williams (1980: 74). 62

—. 1902. Languages of Some Native Tribes of Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria – Yualeai. Journal of the Royal Society of New South Wales, 36. 135-90.

—. 1903. Languages of the Kamilaroi and other Aboriginal Tribes of New South Wales. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 33. 259-83.

Tunbridge, Dorothy. 1988. Affixes of Motion and Direction in Adnyamathanha. Complex Sentence Constructions in Australian Languages.  Edited by Peter Austin. John Benjamins Publishing Company. Amsterdam/Philadelphia. pp

Wilkins, David P. 1989. Mparntwe Arrernte (Aranda): Studies in the Structure and Semantics of Grammar, The Australian National University.

Williams, Corrine. 1980. A Grammar of Yuwaalaraay. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.

Guillemin, Diana

Definiteness and Specificity: Their form and function in the Mauritian Creole noun phrase

Mauritian Creole (MC) is a French based creole, which has retained the SVO word order of its lexifier, and the count mass distinction of nouns. In the early stages of creolization the French determiners incorporated into a large number of the nouns that they modified. The immediate consequence was that all nouns were bare, leading to ambiguous interpretations between [±definite] and [±plural] interpretations. Gradually a new system of determiners emerged in the creole to express these semantic contrasts. It is quite different from that of its lexifier. The most significant differences are that, while in French all nouns, with few exceptions must occur with a determiner, MC admits bare nouns in various syntactic configurations, yielding either a [–definite] plural or [+definite] singular interpretation. In French, all determiners are pre-nominal, while MC has the postnominal specificity marker la. This morpheme is standardly described as a definite article, equivalent to English the (Baker and Hookoomsing, 1987, Virahsawmy, 2004). I argue that the definite determiner in MC is a phonologically null element, and that la is a Specificity marker. I adopt a feature checking analysis within the framework of Chomsky’s Minimalist Program (1995, 2000, 2001) to argue that Definiteness and Specificity are realized as two separate projections in the syntax. The null definite determiner triggers head movement of No to Numo, forcing a singular interpretation of bare count nouns in argument positions. The specificity marker la, which is the highest projection in the MC noun phrase, triggers phrasal movement of a DefP or a DemP to its specifier, deriving the post-nominal position of la. This syntactic analysis of Definiteness and Specificity as separate categories is compatible with the semantic theories of Enç (1991), Farkas (2002) and von Heusinger (2002). ‘Definiteness expresses the discourse pragmatic property of familiarity, while specificity mirrors a more finely grained referential structure of the items used in the discourse’ (von Heusinger 2002:245). I draw on the Familiarity theories of Definiteness (Christophersen, 1939, Karttunen, 1971, Heim 1983, 1988, Kamp 1984) for definitions of Definiteness and Referentiality, in order to establish the relationship, and differences, between Definiteness, Specificity and Referentiality. A syntax-semantics mapping of the new functional items in MC is able to shed light on the process of grammaticalization, and creolization. My analysis is based on large corpus of Mauritian Creole dating from the mid 18th century to the present.  

Baker, Philip, and Hookoomsing, Vinesh Y. 1987. Diksyoner Kreol Morisyen; Dictionary of Mauritian Creole; Dictionnaire du Créole Mauricien. Paris: L'Harmattan.
Chomsky, Noam. 1995. The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press.
Chomsky, Noam. 2000. Derivation by phase. In Ken Hale: A life in language, ed. Michael Kenstowicz. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Chomsky, Noam, and Collins, Chris. 2001. Beyond explanatory adequacy: MIT occasional papers in linguistics ; no. 20. Cambridge, MA: Distributed by MIT Working Papers in Linguistics.
Christophersen, Paul. 1939. The articles: A study of their theory and use in English. Copenhagen: Einar Munksgaard.
Enç, Murvet. 1991. The semantics of specificity. Linguistic Inquiry 22:1-25.
Farkas, Donka F. 2002. Specificity distinctions. Journal of Semantics 19:213-243.
Heim, Irene. 1983. File change semantics and the familiarity theory of definiteness. In Meaning, use and interpretation of language, eds. Rainer Bauerle, Christoph Schwarze and Arnim von Stechow. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Heim, Irene. 1988. The semantics of definite and indefinite noun phrases. New York: Garland Publishing.
Kamp, Hans. 1984. A theory of truth and semantic representation. In Truth, interpretation and information, eds. Jeroen Groenendijk, Theo M. V. Janssen and Martin Stokhof. Dordrecht: Foris Publications.
Karttunen, Lauri Juhani. 1971. Discourse referents. Bloomington: Indiana University Linguistics Club.
Virahsawmy, Dev. 2004. Aprann lir ek ekrir Morisien. CDROM. Rose-Hill, Mauritius: Cygnature Publications.
Von Heusinger, Klaus. 2002. Specificity and definiteness in sentence and discourse structure. Journal of Semantics 19:245-274.

Hendery, Rachel

Subtypes that don’t interact: Diachronic relationships between relative clause constructions and their implications for synchronic typology

Synchronic typological studies of relative clauses have shown that a number of distinct “types” of construction are found in the languages of the world (prenominal and postnominal, finite and participial, internally and externally headed, adjoined and embedded, to name just some of the variations) (De Vries 2002).  In this paper I will argue that the importance of treating these as distinct types is supported by diachronic evidence: especially by the sorts of changes that we do not find. 

Drawing on results from my own cross-linguistic study of changes in relative clause constructions, and on previous studies such as Lehmann (1984), I will show that in languages with more than one type of relative clause (for instance prenominal and postnominal) these very rarely engage with each other in diachronic interactions such as analogical change and extension or the gradual development of one type from another.  Rather, each relative clause type more often interacts in these ways with other, non-relative constructions.  For example, while there are numerous attested cases of features such as marking patterns, word order patterns or verb restrictions being extended from adverbial clauses to finite relative clauses and vice versa (Fleischer 2004, Givón 1974, Nicholas 1998, chap. 5), such interaction occurs much less commonly between finite and participial relative clauses. 

I will argue that the diachronic relationships (and lack of relationships) between types of relative clause and other non-relative constructions provides information about which constructions speakers see as “same” or “different”, and should therefore be taken into account in synchronic typologies as well. 

Keywords:  diachronic syntax, language change, morphosyntax, typology

Fleischer, Jürgen.  2004.  A typology of relative clauses in German dialects.  In Bernd Kortmann, ed. Dialectology meets typology: Dialect grammar from a cross-linguistic perspective.  Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 211-243.

Givón, Talmy.  1974.  Verb complements and relative clauses:  A diachronic case study in Biblical Hebrew.  Afroasiatic Linguistics, 1 (4), pp. 1-22.

Lehmann, Christian. 1984.  Der Relativsatz: Typologie seiner Strukturen, Theorie seiner Funktionen, Kompendium seiner Grammatik.  Tübingen: Gunter Narr. 

Nicholas, Nick. 1998.  The story of pu: the grammaticalisation in space and time of a Modern Greek complementiser.  PhD thesis, University of Melbourne.

de Vries, Mark.  2002. The syntax of relativization. PhD thesis, University of Amsterdam. Published by LOT, Utrecht.

Hendriks, Jennifer

The Garpegenitiv revisited: Linguistic and socio-historical evidence in support of a contact-based account of possessive doubling constructions in Norwegian

Many of the Germanic languages have a possessive doubling construction (I adopt the label common among generativists, cf. Haegeman 2003, Julien 2006) equivalent to ‘the man his house’ with the meaning of ‘the man’s house’. It is not difficult to find cursory references to these constructions in the literature. For example, in a recent comparative survey of the Germanic languages, Harbert (2007:158-9) notes that this construction is ‘[w]idespread among the continental West G[ermanic] languages’ and gives an example each from German, Afrikaans, Dutch, Frisian, Low German, West Jutlandic, Bavarian, and Luxembourgish. Similar discussions can be found in Ramat (1986), Delsing (1998), Koptjevskaja-Tamm (2003) and Julien (2006), among others. In the context of Norwegian, what stands out is the frequent reference to the non-native origins of this construction (called the garpegenitiv, garpe supposedly a pejorative term for members of the Hanseatic league) and the accompanying explanation that it came into Norwegian through contact with Middle Low German Hanseatic merchants in Bergen (Dalen 1994, Koptjevskaja-Tamm 2003, Askedal 2005, Harbert 2007 among others). It therefore comes as a surprise to find that detailed empirical accounts which trace the development of these constructions in any one of the Germanic languages are virtually non-existent. While such studies may not be of primary concern for typological accounts of possessive doubling constructions in Germanic, for those which focus on matters of language contact, they are crucial. This paper examines the linguistic as well as the socio-historical evidence in support of a contact-based account of doubling constructions in Norwegian and shows that previous claims are based on little linguistic data and a rather one-sided view of the contact situation in northern Europe at the time. It will demonstrate that, if a contact-based account is indeed appropriate for Norwegian, it cannot ignore the central role played by Middle Dutch speakers from the Low Countries.

Keywords: possessive doubling constructions, language contact, Middle Dutch, Middle Low German, Norwegian

Askedal, John Ole. 2005. The standard languages and their systems in the 20^th century III: Norwegian. The Nordic languages, ed. by Oskar Bandle et al, 1584-1602. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

Dalen, A. 1994. The influence of Low German on the Norwegian Language. Norwegen und die Hanse, ed. by V. Henn and A Nedkvitne, 31-9. Frankfurt: Peter Lang Verlag.

Delsing, Lars-Olof. 1998. Possession in Germanic. Possessors, predicates and movement in the determiner phrase, ed. by Artemis Alexiadou and Chris Wilder, 87-108. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Haegeman, Liliane. 2003. The external possessor construction in West Flemish. From NP to DP. Volume 2: The expression of possession in noun phrases, ed. by Martine Coene and Yves D’hulst, 221-56. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Harbert, Wayne. 2007. The Germanic languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Julien, Marit. 2006. Nominal phrases from a Scandinavian perspective. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Koptjevskaja-Tamm, Maria. 2003. Possessive noun phrases in the languages of Europe. Noun phrase structure in the languages of Europe, ed. by Frans Plank, 621-722. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Ramat, Paolo. 1986. The Germanic possessive type dem Vater sein Haus. Linguistic theory and historical linguistics, vol. 1, ed. by Dieter Kastovsky and Aleksander Szwedek, 579-90. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Her, One-Soon

Grammatical representation of idioms in LFG

This paper discusses idioms in Mandarin Chinese, e.g., pai mapi (pat horse-ass) ‘to kiss ass’ and chi doufu (eat tofu) ‘to flirt’, including the so-called 'possessive object' construc­tion, such as pai ta-de mapi (pat her horse-ass) ‘to kiss her ass’ or chi ta de doufu (eat her tofu) ‘to flirt with her’. Analyses are rendered within the framework of Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG).

I will first give a definition of idioms and discuss the variation among the syntactic constraints that idiom phrases impose on their idiomatic interpretations. I will then discuss the c-structure solution implied in the treatment of the loosely-defined ‘VO compounds’ by Chao (1968) and Li and Thompson (1981). The f-structure account that Huang (1987, 1990) argues for will also be critically reviewed. With relevant data involving internal modification and lexical and syntactic processes, I will demonstrate that the ambiguous readings (i.e., literal and idiomatic) of idioms are not due to different c-structures or f-structures. I will thus reject both accounts on empirical grounds.

Bresnan's (1982, 2001) analysis of idiom chunks, which involves the a-structure and non-thematic grammatical functions, will then be examined. I will show that posing different a-structures provides a solution only for idioms that do not allow any internal modification and do not undergo any lexical process.

By viewing idioms as lexicalized metaphor, I propose an overall solution that integrates Lakoff's (1987) 'motivation' account and lexical specifications in LFG.

Keywords: idiom, LFG, lexical mapping, metaphor

Bresnan, J. 1982. The passive in lexical theory. In The Mental Representation of Grammatical Relations. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. J. Bresnan (ed.), 3-86.

Bresnan, J. 2001. Lexical-Functional Syntax. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

Chao, Y.-R. 1968. A Grammar of Spoken Chinese. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Everaert, M., E. van der Linden, A. Schenk, and R. Schreuder (eds.). 1995. Idioms: Structural and Psychological Perspectives. Hillside, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers.

Her, O.-S. 1994. Interaction of syntactic changes, in Chinese Languag­es and Linguistics II: Historical Linguistics, 263-93, Taipei: Academia Sinica.

Hsieh, H.-H. 1995. Thematic control and cross-dialectal comparison. Paper presented at ISLIT II, National Taiwan University, June 3-4, 1995.

Huang, C.-R. 1987. Mandarin NP de: a comparative study of current grammatical theories. Ph.D. dissertation, Cornell University.

Huang, C.-R. 1990. A Unification-based Analysis of Lexical Discon­tinu­ity. Linguistics 28, 263-307.

Lakoff, G. 1987. ­Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Catego­ries Reveal about the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Li, C. and S. Thompson. 1981. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar. Berkeley, CA: University of Califor­nia Press.

Jensen, Britta & Rosalind Thornton

Children’s answers to wh-questions

Adult speakers often reply to questions using ‘fragment’ answers. For example, the simple answer in (a) sounds more natural than (b) to the question in (1), below.

(1) When can you go to the cinema?             

            (a)        On Tuesday.

            (b)        I can go to the cinema on Tuesday.

Supplying a legitimate fragment answer requires at least two skills: keeping track of the discourse to know what can be left unsaid and constructing an appropriate syntactic structure. There are, generally speaking, two theories about the syntactic formulation of fragments. Within a generative approach, the standard analysis of fragments involves ellipsis (Merchant 2003, see also Fortin 2007). That is, a full sentence answer is constructed (as in 1b), a portion (here a PP on Tuesday) is then fronted, and the rest of the sentence is deleted/elided, leaving only the fronted portion to be pronounced. Other researchers claim that fragment answers (such as “on Tuesday”, above) are generated as stand-alone categories, with the appropriate syntactic category filled in by pragmatic information (e.g. Barton 1990, Stainton 1995;1997, Jackendoff 2002).

We are attempting to adjudicate between theories by testing the emergence of fragment answers in young children’s grammars. While common sense suggests that children would start with ‘small’ answers (e.g. (a)) and only later produce ‘big’ answers, like the full sentence ones in (b), empirical evidence must decide. A generative approach would predict that children have the full structure available to them, but they must acquire the elision process that leaves behind a fragment. A pragmatic approach might predict that children have to learn by experience what kinds of fragment answers are appropriate in different contexts.

A pilot study of transcripts from the CHILDES database (MacWhinney 2000) reveals that the answers that some children provide can be quite different in their syntax from adults’ answers. Below are two examples from early sessions in the Nina transcript.

(2)        Mother:           Who else is swimming in the water?

            Nina:               Ducks swimming the water.

(3)        Mother:           Who gave you this balloon?

            Nina:               Ellie gave my balloon.

Adults would be more likely to answer question (2) with ‘ducks’ and question (3) with ‘Ellie’ or ‘Ellie did’. Interestingly, in her earliest responses to who questions, Nina produced more full sentence answers than answers of any other type. It seems, therefore, that some children go through a stage in which full sentence answers are provided before (certain kinds of) fragments. Only a Merchant-style analysis predicts this pattern.

In this paper, we present results from a large-scale two-pronged study of children’s answers to wh-questions including data culled from CHILDES transcripts as well as elicited production data from a longitudinal project with four two-year-olds (currently underway).

Keywords: child language, wh-questions, fragments, ellipsis

Barton, E. (1990) Nonsentential Constituents. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Fortin, C. (2007) Some (not all) nonsententials are only a phase. Lingua 117: 67-94.

Jackendoff, R. (2002) Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

MacWhinney, B. (2000). The CHILDES Project: Tools for analyzing talk. 3rd Edition. Vol. 2: The Database.

Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Merchant, J. (2003) Fragments and ellipsis. Linguistics and Philosophy 27: 661-738.

Stainton, R. (1995) Non-sentential assertions and semantic ellipsis. Linguistics and Philosophy 18: 281-296.

Stainton, R. (1997) Utterance meaning and syntactic ellipsis. Pragmatics and Cognition 5: 51-78.

Kelly, Barbara

A new look at redundancy in children’s gesture and speech combinations

When a child points at a banana and says “nana” does the gesture convey the same information as encoded in the speech? Several researchers have suggested that indeed the information is the same (Blake 2000, Goldin-Meadow and Butcher 2003, McNeill 2006). They suggest that when children combine gesture with speech and use the two modalities to refer to the same object, the gesture becomes redundant. In this paper I present evidence to show that when children use speech and gesture together the two modalities do not communicate the same information and neither gesture nor speech should be considered redundant.

In single-word speech young children learning English systematically combine early utterances with non-verbal communicative acts, such as pointing. In an example like “nana” above, the gesture is considered to be redundant because only one piece of information is encoded in the communication and this is in the speech While we cannot examine differences in the child’s intentions when they use only a word versus a word plus gesture, we can examine the communicative affect of using two modalities rather than just one. A useful way to determine what information is being communicated is to look at the caregiver response to a child’s communication and determine whether they treat these communications as the same.

If the gesture modality of a gesture and speech combination is redundant then we can make the following predictions:

• there will be no difference in the frequency of caregiver responses to words on their own versus when words are combined with gesture; and

• when caregivers do respond to children’s gesture-speech combinations the response will not differ from responses to speech alone.

Data for this study comes from a video corpus of spontaneous interactions of five children from around 12-30 months. Findings indicate that neither prediction holds. Children’s gestures are not redundant when combined with speech. Caregivers respond more frequently to words combined with gesture than words used on their own. Further, when a child says “nana” caregivers treat the communication as though the child is saying “that’s a banana”. When a child points at a banana and says “nana” caregivers treat the communication as though the child is asking them to “look at the banana” – they treat it as an action request. In children’s gesture plus speech communications the gesture does not convey the same information as encoded in the speech. In this paper I will show that the gesture has a clear communicative function and is not redundant when combined with children’s speech.

Keywords: child language, gesture, non-verbal communication, redundancy, caregiver input

Blake, J. (2000) Routes to child language. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge UK.

Goldin-Meadow, S. & Butcher, C. (2003) Pointing toward two-word speech in young children. In S. Kita (ed.), Pointing: Where language, culture, and cognition meet. Lawrence Erlbaum, New Jersey.

McNeill, D. (2006). Gesture and thought. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Kubo, Kazumi & Michiko Suwa

Situational boundaries in the early use of tense marking by L1 learners of Japanese

The aim of this presentation is to report on ongoing research into the early tense marking by Japanese children. More specifically, this paper focuses on identifying which part of situations children mark with  a part marker -ta in their early use.

Japanese tense markers, both the past and present, can identify one of two aspects of a situation (Kudo 1995). One way is to mark the temporal location of whole situation in relation to speech time (1). The other is to mark a boundary between situations (either inchoative or end point) in relation to the speech time (2). Therefore, in the process of acquisition, children must learn both ways of marking situations. A question that arises is to which use is acquired first.

(1)        Kesa asagohan o tabeta.
            This morning breakfast-OBJ eat-PST.
            ‘I ate breakfast this morning.’

(2)       The whole family is watching a puppy which has not eaten anything since it came home two days ago. Suddenly the puppy begins eating his food for the first time.

            A, tabeta.
            Wow, eat-PST
            ‘It ate!!’

Results of analysis of three longitudinal data of Japanese children from CHILDES (Miyata1995, 1998, 2000) show that the early use of the past marker predominantly refers to a boundary between situations, and is only later used to mark the whole situation as past. This result is similar to that of Shirai and Miyata (2006) who have argued that the early use of the past morpheme is more perfect than past. However the present paper differs from these others studies in categorizing uses of the past marker by the part of the situation whose time. Many of the previous studies on the early stage of tense and aspect acquisition have reported the relationship between tense markers and lexical aspects. This is particularly true of past markers cross-linguistically, which seem to be strongly correlated with change-of-state verbs (Shirai et al 1998). By contrast, this paper considers the correlation between past marking and situation-internal temporal boundaries.

Keywords: tense, acquisition, Japanese

Kudo, Mayumi. 1995. The system of tense and aspect- Temporal expression of Modern Japanese [Tensu,asupecuto taikei to tekisuto-gendainihongo no jikan no hyougen ].: Series for Japanese Research. Tokyo: Hitsuji.

Miyata, Susanne.1995, The Aki Corpus. Longitudinal Speech Data of a Japanese Boy aged 1; 6-2; 12. Bulletin of Shukutoku Junior College,34, 183-191

Miyata, Suzanne. 1998, The RYO corpus - longitudinal speech data of a Japanese boy aged 1.3 – 3.0.

Miyata, Susanne. 2000, The Tai corpus - Longitudinal speech data of a Japanese boy aged 1;5.2 -3;1.1’, Bulletin of Shukutoku Junior College, 39, 77-85.

Shirai, Yasuhiro and Miyata, Susanne. 2006. Does Past Tense Marking Indicate the Acquisition of the Concept of Temporal Displacement in Children’s Cognitive Development? First Language, 26(1). 45-66.

Shirai, Yasuhiro, Slobin, Dan Isaac and Weist, Richard E. 1998. Introduction: The Acquisition of Tense-Aspect Morphology. First Language, 18. 245-253.

Laughren, Mary

Deriving new verbs in Warlpiri

All languages have a mechanism for creating new verbs. Languages may create new verbs from existing vocabulary or may borrow verbs from another language, or may combine both possibilities. English verbs divide into two types: the so-called ‘strong’ or ‘irregular’ verbs which inflect using synchronically unpredictable forms which must be specified and the ‘weak’ or ‘regular’ verbs whose inflectional forms follow a fixed known (and hence predictable) template. New English verbs (excluding new compounds which incorporate an existing verb) are created as ‘weak’ verbs, whose imperative, infinitive and present tense (apart from third singular) forms are phonologically equivalent to the verb stem. Other forms are created by suffixes hosted by the verb stem which undergoes no phonological change. English verb creation basically involves zero derivation: a new stem is introduced and incorporated into the ‘weak’ verbal paradigm. Interestingly, English uses this mechanism to create intransitive to goal, medal, water, transitive to bottle, water, access and ditransitive verbs to hand (to). English also has an analytical mechanism for creating phrasal predicates which incorporate a ‘light’ verb: become, turn, get, make, drive, render, do, have, take…

Warlpiri creates new verbs by using a preexisting pair of bound verbal stems ‑jarri for intransitive and ‑ma- for transitive (there is no productive ditransitive verbaliser) to which the incorporated element is preposed (Nash 1982, 1986, Simpson 1991). The non-verbal elements within this verbal complex are invariant in form, although these forms may be morphologically and even syntactically complex. Interestingly the Warlpiri verbal complex has features of both the analytic predicate formation and the synthetic verb creation of English.

This paper examines the morpho-syntactic and semantic properties of Warlpiri –ma- and –jarri verbs and proposes a solution in which these verbalisers symbolise aspectual heads within a phrasal structure which incorporates the non-verbal component of the complex verb, in the manner of do lunch phrasal predicates which are more restricted than the light verb contructions of the VERB (x) XP (make him happy, take a bath). While lunch behaves like a Xº category in do lunch since it cannot be expanded into a phrase (e.g., *do long/light lunch) it does not form a compound with do despite the fact that no other constituent may intervene between do and lunch. Warlpiri complex verbs with –jarri/-ma- do allow certain constituents to intervene between them and the preposed constituent, which we will also offer an explanation for.

Keywords: Warlpiri, verb formation, phrasal verbs, aspectual structure

Nash, David. 1982. Warlpiri preverbs and verb roots. In Swartz, Stephen (ed.) Papers in Warlpiri grammar: in memory of Lothar Jagst (Work Papers of SIL-AAB, Series A Volume 6) 165-216. Berrimah, N.T.: SIL-AAB.

Nash, David. 1986. Topics in Warlpiri Grammar. Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics. Third Series.New York, London: Garland Publishing Inc.

Simpson, Jane. 1991. Warlpiri Morpho-Syntax. A Lexicalist Approach. Dordrecht/ Boston/ London: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory Volume 23.

Lees, Aet

The partitive case in Balto-Finnic clauses with the verb ‘to be’

The main aim of this study is to look at the use of the partitive case in connection with the verb ‘to be’. Those clauses where ‘be’ is an auxiliary have been excluded from the study. The remainder are divided into two groups:

Group 1

Group 1 consists of canonical copula clauses, which have a subject and a complement. This group has been divided into three sections:

a. With a noun phrase complement in nominative or partitive case.

b. With an adjectival phrase complement in nominative or partitive case.

c. With a complement consisting of a noun phrase in any other case, a prepositional phrase, an adverbial phrase or a clause. In Balto-Finnic languages a noun in a semantic case often corresponds to a prepositional phrase in languages like English.

Group 1c as a whole has not been analyzed, as the partitive case is not found in this group. However, there is an overlap between locative clauses in this group and existential clauses, which can cause difficulties with classification. This will be discussed.

Group 2.

Existential clauses: In Balto-Finnic the partitive case can be used for the single argument of the existential verb, and is often referred to as ‘partitive subject’. However, the nominative case also occurs. Word order then becomes an important feature for the purpose of classification. Most existential clauses begin with an adverbial phrase, commonly indicating location.  Although verbs other than ‘be’ are also found in existential clauses, only brief reference will be made to these in this study.

Possessive clauses: In Balto-Finnic there is no verb ‘have’. Instead, the construction consists of the possessor in the adessive case (a local case indicating position on something), the verb ‘be’ and the possessum in the nominative or partitive case. In Livonian the dative case is found instead of the adessive, and in others occasionally the allative case. These clauses form a subgroup of existential clauses.

Texts from the Bible in Estonian, Finnish, Karelian, Livonian and Veps have been compared. Early Bible texts in Finnish (16-19^th century) and Estonian (17-18^th century) have also been studied, as well as some secular material. Modern Finnish Bible texts have a partitive complement in group 1a in about 40% of instances and 1b in about 60%. In the other languages a partitive complement is found rarely in group 1a, mostly with pronouns, and not at all in group 1b.  In the 1880 and earlier Finnish Bibles there are only a few pronominal examples in group 1a and none in group 1b, so the frequent use of the partitive in this context is a recent development in Finnish. In other texts some examples can be found in the other languages, but nowhere near the extent in Finnish.

In group 2 most negative clauses have a partitive argument in all the languages studied. Occasional exceptions are found, especially in early texts. The case of mass nouns and plural count nouns is often partitive also in affirmative existential clauses, more commonly in possessive clauses. The nominative case here usually indicates definiteness/specificity and the total nature of the possessum. Some differences are found between the various languages. In early Bible texts partitive usage is more irregular.

Key words: Copula Complement Partitive Existential Possessive Balto-Finnic

Libert, Alan Reed

The Limits to Variation in Turkish Nominal Morphosyntax

In some syntactic contexts morphological marking is optional, or varies, in contemporary Turkish. For example, when one noun modifies another, prescriptively the modified noun must usually bear 3rd person possession marking (1a), but in reality this ending is often omitted (1b):

(1)        a.         Havra           Sokağ-ı
                        synagogue    street-3SG         
                        ‘Synagogue Street’ (a street in Izmir)

            b.         Havra           Sokak

However, there are contexts in which it is rarely or never left out, and some of these contexts are quite similar to those in which it is optional, for example in names of avenues (as opposed to those of streets):

(2)       Atatürk            Cadde-si
            Atatürk            avenue-3SG
            ‘Atatürk Avenue’ (an avenue in several cities in Turkey)

Somewhat similarly, there are some postpositions which prescriptively require their objects to be in the genitive if they are certain pronouns. It is possible for at least one of these pronouns to appear without the genitive suffix, i.e. in the nominative:

(3)        kim-in           /  kim               için
            who-GEN    /  who(NOM)  for
            ‘for whom?’ (Lewis 1988:86)

This sort of alternation does not happen with some other postpositions. For example, göre ‘according to’ can only take dative objects, and not nominative ones:

(4)        bu        vaziyet-e             /  *vaziyet                 göre
            this      situation-DAT    /  situation(NOM)    in.view.of
            ‘in view of this situation’ (Lewis 1988:88)

In this paper I account for the main restrictions on Turkish nominal morphosyntactic variation. An array of different factors must be invoked. Phonetic/phonological factors may be involved to some extent, e.g. in the difference between the ‘street’ and ‘avenue’ cases. However, I shall argue that the most significant determinant is the type of information conveyed by an affix: those containing only grammatical information are omissible, those with semantic content are not.

Keywords: Turkish, morphology, morphosyntax, case

Lewis, G. L. (1988) Turkish Grammar. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Liddicoat, Anthony J.

Models of national government language-in-education policy for indigenous minority language groups

The language policies of national governments construct the ways in which languages and their relative value are perceived at the official level. Official language-in-education policies in favour of minority indigenous languages is a relatively new dimension of the language planning work of national governments and, where it exists typically replaces an older, colonialist tradition of language planning which either neglected or actively opposed the use of these languages. This paper will examine some cases of language-in-education planning which show a range of approaches to the use of indigenous languages in educational contexts. Typical approaches to language-in-education planning for indigenous minority languages include: (1) officialisation of the minority languages; (2) vernacular literacy programs; (3) language maintenance, revitalisation and retrieval programs; (5) language study as subject. While language planning has usually considered such approaches in terms of structures, practices and outcomes, little focus has been given to the ways in which such planning attempts construct languages at the symbolic level. This paper will examine the ways in which language planning work operates on a symbolic level to reflect and reproduce relationships between indigenous minorities and dominant language groups in which established power and economic relationships and perceptions of relative cultural capital are entrenched rather than challenged.

Keywords: language policy, indigenous languages, language planning, language maintenance

Mailhammer, Robert

Family traits or adopted features? Characteristic features of the Amurdak verb system

Amurdak, a non-Pama-Nyungan language of Northern Arnhem Land, is traditionally viewed as part of the Iwaidjan language family. However, the exact genetic relation of Amurdak to other members of this group and its diachronic development are far from clear (Evans 2000: 95). This talk focuses on the verb morphology of Amurdak in relation to Iwaidja, one of the core members of the language family. One striking feature of Amurdak is that there seems to be surprisingly little cognate morphology, which raises questions about the genetic relation to the Iwaidjan family.

The morphological template of the Amurdak verb displays a rather diverse set of subject pronominal prefixes that also serve to mark tense and a set of postponed subject and object clitics indicating person and. Handelsmann (1991:65) argues against these clitics being suffixes for phonological and morphological reasons and suggests that they acquired their clitic status fairly recently, having evolved from free pronouns and numerals. This is particularly striking in the dual an trial forms, which seem to have developed during the last 60 years (cf. Capell 1943). Iwaidja, by contrast, possesses distinct sets of verbal suffixes indicating tense and mood in conjunction with prefixes that encode person and number of subject/object as well as tense (e.g. future) and mood (e.g. imperative).  Looking at the verbal prefixes of Amurdak, it is striking how systematically complicated the system is, as the shape of the prefix is determined by the relevant verb, which results in conjugational classes of prefixes. In some cases, the prefix can be related to Iwaidja, although the correspondences are not always straightforward and may in some cases point to a reanalysis and subsequent over-generalisation of one particular prefix form, which is responsible for the complex prefix system (see also Evans 2000:119). For instance, future prefixes in Amurdak often correspond to those in Iwaidja although catergorial matches are frequently imprecise.

(1)        Future prefixes in Amurdak and Iwaidja

Am jaban- (3sg FUT with -yag ‘go’) : Iw ya-bana- (3sg FUT directional ‘away’)

Am abana- (1pl FUT with -¨agan ‘see’) : Iw abana- (1sg3sg FUT)

Am aman- (1sg/pl FUT with –ya ‘eat’) : Iw aN-mana- (2sg FUT)

Another example for corresponding forms is that some Amurdak plural prefixes seem to reflect the dual prefix wun- in Iwaidja, as in Am awun-ya ‘you (pl.) ate’. In some cases there may be some phonological processes that are responsible for the formal discrepancy between Amurdak and Iwaidja, e.g. awur-wi´agin ‘you (pl.) grew’. From a categorical point of view it is striking how simple the morphological system of the verb is in comparison to e.g. Iwaidja. For instance, the mood marking system of both Iwaidja and Maung seems to be considerably more complex than that of Amurdak, which seems to possess only one particle expressing modal possibility, mala (see Handelsmann 1991 and Verstraeten 2006).

This talk presents striking features of the Amurdak verb system in relation to Iwaidja and other members of the Iwaidjan family, aiming at opening up a discussion on the genetic connection and historical development of Amurdak.

Keywords: Amurdak, verb morphology, Non-Pama-Nyungan languages, Iwaidja

Capell, A. (1943), “The Classification of Languages in North and West Australia”, Oceania 13, 24-51

Evans, N. (2000), “Iwaidjan, a very un-Australian language family”, Linguistic Typology 4, 91-142

Handelsmann,, R. (1991), Towards a Description of Amurdak: A Language of Northern Australia, Honours Thesis, University of Melbourne

Verstraete, J.-C.( 2006), “The semantics and pragmatics of composite mood marking: The non-Pama-Nyungan languages of Northern Australia, Linguistic Typology 9, 223-268

Margetts, Anna

Noun incorporation in Saliba (Oceanic, PNG)

Saliba has two types of noun incorporation which correspond to the patterns Mithun (1984) describes as type I and II in her typology of incorporation. In both types of constructions, a noun is morphologically incorporated into the verb losing its syntactic independence. In the first type, lexical compounding, the incorporated noun specifies the activity expressed by the verb and it generally corresponds to the object argument in the related analytic clause. What is unusual about the Saliba constructions is that both N‑V and V‑N morpheme ordering can occur within the incorporating construction, as shown in (1) and (2). The order of morphemes is not predictable and it depends on the verb itself whether the noun is incorporated into the position preceding or following the verb stem.

A second typologically unusual feature of the Saliba constructions is that certain intransitive verbs can incorporate a noun much in the same way as transitive verbs can. Examples are given in (3) and (4). The noun in these constructions can be argued to be the semantic object even though the verb is morphologically intransitive.

In this presentation, I describe the different patterns found with type I incorporation in Saliba and discuss the constraints governing there constructions.

Keywords: Austronesian, Oceanic, PNG languages, typology, (noun) incorporation

Martin, Kylie

Itak an ro:  an exploration of language learning amongst Ainu communities in Japan

In recent years, the Ainu communities in Japan have successfully begun to reclaim and revitalise their ancestral culture and language. Over the last 100 years or so, the Ainu language communities have experienced drastic changes in their language environment which has led to widespread language shift away from the Ainu language towards Japanese. This language shift has occurred as a result of past Japanese colonial policies and the associated national ideology of refusing to acknowledge the ethno-linguistic diversity that exists within the borders of the modern Japanese nation-state. The Ainu people are now fighting against the often bleak and pessimistic perception by both scholars and mainstream Japanese, that their culture and language should be “classified as an ex-people with a dead language” (Maher 1993: 8). A number of Ainu language and culture classes are held throughout Hokkaido and other regions of Japan. However, the teaching and learning of the Ainu language amongst the Ainu communities still remains low. Within an ecological framework for studying linguistic diversity, this paper will explore and analyse those factors affecting the relationship between language and identity and how this influences Ainu language acquisition. An ecological paradigm as interpreted by Mühlhäusler (1996, 2000, 2003) and Mufwene (2002, 2004) has been adopted to help gain a more in-depth and accurate method of researching endangered language communities as it allows for the complex web of interrelationships between cultures and communities to be studied. In order to investigate the dynamics of Ainu language revitalisation, aspects of the past and present language ecologies of the Ainu language will be presented along with a case study based on recent fieldwork in Hokkaido (2004-2006) to demonstrate the application of the ecological paradigm at a micro level. Such research can only be regarded as tentative, as only preliminary analysis of the data has yet been conducted. It appears that while Ainu people have indicated that the language is an integral component of the contemporary Ainu identity, such a perception does not result in actual language learning and usage. One reason is the lack of perceived economic benefit in learning and using the language as it is seen to be of value as an identity marker and as a means of empowerment, rather than to improve the often poor socio-economic status of Ainu people. These initial findings may be of benefit in gaining a better understanding of the complexities involved in the current Ainu linguistic ecologies. The Ainu elder Shigeru Kayano has suggested that while a balance between the traditional values of the Ainu communities and the modern realities of society in Japan and the world is complex, but that a balance will be found for the promotion and development of the Ainu language and culture (cited in Anderson & Iwasaki-Goodman 2001).

Keywords: Ainu language; endangered language; language attitudes; ecological paradigm; language maintenance/shift

Anderson, F. and Iwasaki-Goodman, M. (2001) ‘Language and culture revitalisation in a Hokkaido Ainu Community’, in M. Noguchi and S. Fotos (eds.)  Studies in Japanese Bilingualism. Clevendon: Multilingual Matters, pp. 45-67.

Maher, J. (1993) ‘Ainu, undeniably alive” The survival and revival of a language heritage’, The Japan Times Weekly, pp. 8-10.

Mufwene, S. (2002) Colonisation, Globalisation, and the Future of Languages in the Twenty-first Century, Journal on Multicultural Societies, 4(2), pp. 1-48.

Mufwene, S. (2004) ‘Language birth and death’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 33, pp. 201-222.

Mühlhäusler, P. (1996) Linguistic Ecology: Language change and linguistic imperialism in the Pacific region. London: Routledge.

Mühlhäusler, P. (2000) ‘Language planning and language ecology’. Current Issues in Language Planning, 1, pp. 306-367.

Mühlhäusler, P. (2003) ‘Review Articles: Language endangerment and language revival’, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 7 (2), pp. 232-245.

Noguchi, M. and Fotos, S. (eds.) (2001) Studies in Japanese Bilingualism. Clevendon: Multilingual Matters.

Martín Arista, Javier

The Nucleus Principle and the Layered Structure of the Word

The Layered Structure of the Word, as devised by Mairal and Cortés (2000-2001), Everett (2002), Cortés (2006), Martín Arista (2006), Cortés (forthcoming) and Martín Arista (forthcoming), has generalised to word structure the descriptive-explanatory apparatus adopted by Role and Reference Grammar (Foley and Van Valin 1984, Van Valin and LaPolla 1997, Van Valin 2005) for representing clausal categories and relations, namely the Layered Structure of the Clause. The purpose of this paper is to provide the Layered Structure of the Word with an adequate means of dealing with overlappings between diachronic and synchronic word formation. In other words, the Nucleus Principle is proposed in order to guarantee a dynamic view of the relationship between diachronic evolution and synchronic opacity. The Nucleus Principle stipulates that non-productive and opaque derivations take place in the Nucleus of the Word, previous to the insertion of lexical arguments into the Argument and Argument-Adjunct postions of the Word; and previous to the assignment of lexical operators to underived bases at Core level and to derived bases at Word level.

The language of analysis of this paper is Old English, in which instances of inflected bases like the following are not infrequent (respectively, in the genitive, comparative, superlative, past participle and present participle):

(1)

a.         ælmesdæd ‘alms-deed’
b.         geomorfrod ‘very old’
c.         endemestnes ‘extremity’
d.         druncengeorn ‘drunken’
e.         acumendlicnes ‘possibility’

Ablaut and stem derivation (incluiding compounding) are also relatively frequent in Old English, as illustrated by (2.a) and (2.b), respectively:

(2)

a.         brecan(-bræc-bræ:con-brocen)~bræc ‘noise, sound’
            beran(-bær-bæ:ron-boren)~byre ‘child’
            cwe∂an(-cwæ∂-cwæ:∂on-cwe∂en)~cwyde ‘speech’

b.         bana~ban: banga:r ‘murdering spear’, banweorc ‘manslaughter’
            bro:ha~bro:h: bro:h∂re:a ‘dire calamity’
            clufu~cluf: cluf∂ung ‘crowfoot’, clufwyrt ‘buttercup’

This proposal boils down to circurmscribing these phenomena to the Nucleus, in such a way that this layer produces bases immediately ready for derivation (including compounding), regardless of whether they are the product of gradation or inflection; and of whether they qualify as stems or words. Moreover, stem or word formation through alternation with forms resulting from Ablaut, as in byre and cwyde in (2.a), also constitutes a nuclear phenomenon. Under the Nucleus Principle, gradation and the inflection that feeds derivation take place within the Nucleus, rather than at Word level. This has the theoretical advantage of drawing a distinction between syntagmatic inflection, which takes place at Word and Phrase level, and paradigmatic inflection, which remains exclusively nuclear. Example (3.a) represents syntagmatic inflection in the Layered Structure of the Word (operator projection), while example (3.b) illustrates paradigmatic inflection in the Layered Structure of the Word (constituent projection):

(3)  This example does not convert well to HTML.  To view a PDF version of it, please click here.

Cortés Rodríguez, F. 2006. Derivational Morphology in Role and Reference Grammar: A New Proposal. Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada 19: 41-66.

Cortés Rodríguez, F. Negative Affixation within the Lexical Grammar Model. RæL (forthcoming).

Everett, D. 2002. Towards an RRG theory of morphology. Lecture delivered at The 2002 International Conference on Role and Reference Grammar, held at the University of La Rioja.

Foley, W. and Van Valin, R. 1984. Functional Syntax and Universal Grammar. Cambridge: CUP.

Mairal Usón, R. and Cortés Rodríguez, F. 2000-2001. Semantic packaging and syntactic projections in word formation processes: the case of agent nominalizations. Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada 14: 271-294.

Martín Arista, J. 2006. Derivation and compounding in a structural-functional theory of morphology. Paper delivered at the meeting of the Danish Functional Grammar Group held at the University of Copenhagen, April 2006.

Martín Arista, J. Unification and separation in a functional theory of morphology (forthcoming).

Van Valin, R. 2005. Exploring the Syntax-Semantics Interface. Cambridge: CUP.

Van Valin, R. and LaPolla, R. 1997. Syntax: Structure, meaning and function. Cambridge: CUP.

Mason, Te Haumihiata

Some of the challenges of writing the first monolingual Māori dictionary (Plenary)

Māori culture is still in the early stages of a renaissance, and a cornerstone of any culture is its language. Te Mātāpuna is the first monolingual Māori dictionary for adults. As such, it has a major role to play in preserving not only Māori language, but Māori values and thought as well. The challenge of compiling a dictionary from scratch together with the responsibility of helping preserve a culture, and doing right by those who have battled to keep the language alive to the present time, has made the task exceedingly difficult. This presentation will talk about some of the challenges and rewards encountered while compiling a monolingual dictionary that will hopefully further assist efforts to revitalize Māori language.

McKay, Graham

Cohesive Features in Rembarrnga Narratives

A number of features found in spoken narratives in the Rembarrnga language of Arnhem Land can be seen to serve a cohesive function within the text.  These include not only ellipsis of pronominal prefixes and tense marking from the verb complex but also the repetition of  fully inflected verbs in subsequent sentences in order to background completion of one activity/event in the process of moving on to the next.  Repetition of sentence elements in differing order allows focus to come upon different elements in turn.  Incorporation of the noun into the verb complex allows cohesive backgrounding of a nominal element following its initial introduction to the text.  A number of text examples of such apparently cohesive features will be explored.

Keywords: cohesion, Rembarrnga, noun incorporation, ellipsis, repetition, backgrounding, narrative

Minagawa, Harumi

Referential account on the constraints on NP-external placement of quantity expressions in Japanese

It is generally agreed that in Japanese NP-external placement of quantity expressions (often referred to as ‘quantifier float’ in the discussion within the framework of generative grammar) can occur with noun phrases in the nominative and accusative cases and sometimes with ni-marked cases, which can be dative, locative, by-agent, etc, but that they do not occur with oblique cases such as de ‘at’, kara ‘from’, to ‘with’ and ni/e ‘to’. Most of the accounts are syntactically based: Harada (1976), Kuno (1978) and Okutsu (1969; 1974) suggest that the constraints are governed by grammatical relations, and that the NP-external construction can only occur with subjects and direct objects. Kuno (1978) notes, however, that a ni-marked subject (or dative subject) does not allow quantifier floating. Inoue (1978) also argues that quantifier float is permissible with a “quasi-object” as well as the subject and direct object. Shibatani (1977; 1978) suggests that the constraints are governed by the grammatical case of the quantified noun phrase rather than syntactic relations. Miyagawa (1989) proposes constraints based on internal constituent structures, i.e. a quantifier may float from an argument of a verb, a constituent whose head is a noun; but that it does not float from an adjunct, a constituent whose head is a postposition such as de, kara, to, and ni.

Martin (1975), a Japanese grammarian, on the other hand, takes the different view that quantity expressions do occur NP-externally with oblique cases in spoken language. He states, ‘It is sometimes held that adverbialization of the number is possible only when the noun is marked by ga or o, but this is not quite true; ‘N kara/to/ni/e/Number’ are infrequent in print but they occur in conversation’ (Martin 1975, 779). However, he presents no attested examples to support his view.

This study examines the phenomenon from the point of view of the referential characteristic of the quantified entities. While recognizing the infrequency of their occurrence, it shows, with attested examples, that quantity expressions do occur NP-externally with nouns phrases in oblique cases when the quantified entities are highly non-specific. This study thus points out the inadequacy of attempting to account for this phenomenon solely from the syntactic point of view.

References include:
Harada, Shinichi. 1976. Quantifier float as a relational rule. Metropolitan Linguistics 1. 44-49.
Inoue, Kazuko. 1978. Nihongo no bumpoo hoosoku (Rules of Japanese grammar). Tokyo: Taishuukan.
Kuno, Susumu. 1978. Theoretical perspectives on Japanese linguistics. In Hinds, J. and Howard, I. (eds) Problems in Japanese syntax and semantics. Tokyo: Kaitakusha. 213-85.
Martin, Samuel. 1975. A reference grammar of Japanese. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Miyagawa, Shigeru. 1988. Predication and numeral quantifiers. In Poser, W. J. (ed.) Papers from the second international workshop on Japanese syntax. Stanford: Center for the Study of Language and Information. 157-92.
Okutsu, Keiichiroo. 1969. Suuryookei hyoogen no bunpoo (Grammar of quantity expressions). Nihongo Kyooiku 14. 42-60.
Okutsu, Keiichiroo. 1974. Seisei nihon bunpooron (Generative Japanese grammar). Tokyo: Taishuukan
Shibatani, Masayoshi. 1977. Grammatical relations and surface cases. Language 53. 789-809.
Shibatani, Masayoshi. 1978  Nihongo no bunseki (Analysis of the Japanese language). Tokyo: Taishuukan.

Moore, David

A history of the development of the phoneme in Australian linguistics

This paper provides a brief overview of the three periods in the history of Australian linguistics based upon that of McGregor (forthcoming) and traces the development of the phoneme concept and its application to Australian languages. 

Early researchers of Australian languages generally spoke of letters rather than sounds and often used transcriptions which were based upon those of the researcher’s own language, usually English. Others were guided by systems of transcription such as those of Lepsius and the Royal Geographical Society with the result that their orthographies more consistently represented the sounds of Australian languages. 

Phonetics developed in Australia in the early part of the twentieth century with the increasing use of the International Phonetic Alphabet to record increasingly more minute sound distinctions. The development of the phoneme concept in Australian linguistics was primarily due to the adoption of the methods of American Structuralist linguistics. The use of the phoneme concept began in the 1950s but didn’t gain widespread acceptance until the 1960s.

This paper is a contribution to the emergent field of the history of Australian linguistics.

Keywords: phonetics, phoneme, orthography, transcription. 

Mühlhäusler, Peter

Is Pitkern-Norf’k a Creole Language?

In spite of earlier characterisations of Pitkern-Norf’k (PN) as a canonical creole, the ontological status of this language is far from clear. Indeed, when trying to fit Pitkern-Norf’k into conventional structural and sociolinguistic categorisations, many problems are encountered.

I shall first examine how recently proposed diagnostic structural features – e.g. those developed by Baker and Huber, Kortmann and the proposed WALS (pidgins and Creoles) – lead to conflicting answers when applied to the same linguistic data. The problem is compounded by the fact that not all areas of PN grammar have been well documented and that, moreover, there is considerable inter-individual and group variation in its grammar. I shall then show how an in-depth description of three areas grammar (definiteness-specificity, categorical multifunctionality and benefactives) can be used to determine the status of PN.

The examination of diagnostic structural features will be supplemented with an examination of whether proposed social categories of contact languages can provide a more definitive answer. Again, PN is difficult to fit into currently used social typologies.

In my conclusions I shall:

• propose some suggestions on how to refine structural and social diagnostic instruments for creoleness

• raise the problem of languages such as PN that change their structural and social properties over time

• discuss the use of labels such as Creole, creoloid and World Englishes

• comment on the problematic status of metalinguistics labels such as ‘a language’

 The paper is based on many years of first-hand experience and detailed study of the linguistic history of PN.

 Keywords: creole typology, Pitkern-Norf’k,metalinguistic terms

Musgrave, Simon

Typology and geography in Eastern Indonesia

Himmelmann (2005) identifies two typological profiles amongst the non-Oceanic Austronesian languages. One of these (the ‘symmetrical voice’ type) is associated with the more westerly part of the Austronesian region in Asia, while the other (the ‘preposed possessor’ type) is found in Eastern Indonesia, specifically in Timor, Maluku and West Irian, as well as in many Malay varieties. This second type is mainly restricted to a small geographic region, basically the Indonesian archipelago east of Sulawesi, while the first type occurs in a wider region including Taiwan, the Philippines, western Indonesia and Madagascar.

The geographic clustering of the preposed possessor type must be considered in the context of the region’s linguistic history. The Austronesian languages of Eastern Indonesia mostly fall within the proposed Central Malayo-Polynesian sub-group, but evidence for the existence of this group is not strong (Ross 1995). Further, speakers of Austronesian languages only arrived in this region around 6,000 years before the present and non-Austronesian languages continue to be spoken in at least some parts of the region. Given this background, features inherited from a common Austronesian ancestor would be expected to have a different geographic distribution from features which are the result of contact with typologically different languages, most likely non-Austronesian.

Himmelmann lists eight features which characterise the preposed possessor type and this paper examines the geographic distribution of these eight features across languages of Eastern Indonesia. Central Maluku emerges as the area in which the criterial features co-occur most frequently, and the geographic clustering is made clearer when additional features, such as the presence of a special non-human pronominal, are also considered. This result (and indeed Himmelmann’s terminology) accords with the insight dating back to at least van Hoëvell (1877) that the order possessor-possessed occurs in the languages of Maluku, distinguishing them from the majority of Austronesian languages. However, the distribution of the individual features is not identical, and this suggests that different features have varying origins and therefore that the focus of the cluster in Central Maluku is best interpreted as the result of the interaction of various processes of language change.

Keywords: language typology, Austronesian languages, eastern Indonesia, Maluku, linguistic areas

Himmelmann, Nikolaus P. 2005. The Austronesian languages of Asia and Madagascar: typological characteristics. In The Austronesian Languages of Asia and Madagascar, eds. K. Alexander Adelaar and Nikolaus P. Himmelmann, 110-181. London: Routledge.

Hoëvell, G.W.W.C. van. 1877. Iets over de vijf voornaamste dialecten der Ambonsche landtaal (bahasa tanah). Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde van Nederlandsch Indië 24:1-136.

Ross, Malcolm D. 1995. Some current issues in Austronesian linguistics. In Comparative Austronesian Dictionary: An introduction to Austronesian studies, ed. Darrell T. Tryon, 45-120. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Nagaya, Naonori

Rethinking referentiality of Tagalog ang-phrases

This paper claims that the article ang in Tagalog indicates different degrees of referentiality in different contexts, and that the non-referential uses are more frequent than the referential uses in spoken narrative texts. It is also observed that the referential uses of the article ang are now being taken over by another article yung. The empirical support for these claims comes from the analyses and text-counts of 41 spoken narrative texts (approximately 17,000 words/130 minutes), which are composed of Pear stories (Chafe 1980) and monologues the present author has recorded in Metro Manila, Philippines.

The Tagalog article ang heads a variety of nominal expressions but not personal names. In the literature, ang-phrases (“ang X”) have been claimed to be definite (Blake 1925), topic (Schachter 1976), or specific (Himmelmann 2004, 2005). That is, they have been considered referential. However, looking at the actual usage of ang reveals a different story. First, ang-phrases can be either referential or non-referential depending on in what construction they are used. In our database, the article ang introduces [a] an identifiable referent (1), [b] a non-identifiable referent with an indefinite numeral such as isa ‘one’ (2), [c] the subject of a pseudo-cleft or “specificational sentence” (Higgins 1979) (3), [d] a left-dislocated parenthetical phrase for framing the following utterance (4 and 5), and [e] an exclamatory expression (6). This study analyzes ang-phrases of the [c], [d], and [e] variety as non-referential in the sense that there is no specific individual being referred to (Payne 1997). Instead, the subject of a pseudo-cleft or specificational sentence provides a presupposed open proposition or variable whose value is specified by the predicate noun (Declerck 1988, Lambrecht 1994, 2001), a left-dislocated parenthetical phrase situates the rest of the utterance in a discourse (for example, indicating a quotation as in 4), and an exclamatory expression describes a psychological state of the speaker.

Second, in our database, the non-referential uses of ang ([c], [d] and [e]) occur more frequently than the referential uses ([a] and [b]) do. See Table 1.

Third, as shown in Table 1, most identifiable referents are introduced by another less formal article yung, which is a grammaticalized form of the distal demonstrative pronoun iyon and linker -ng (Himmelmann 2005). It follows that the identifiable reference, which has been considered to be the prototypical function of ang, is now being taken over by yung.

Thus, the article ang is more polyfunctional than has been assumed in the literature, and its non-referential uses are more frequent than its referential uses in the spoken narratives. The referentiality of Tagalog ang-phrases is not determined prior to, but emerges through, the actual usage.

Table 1

Examples: Note that Tagalog is consistently head-initial, and the genitive case marks an agent as well as a possessor. Ang-phrases are in boldface and (headless) relative clauses are put in parentheses. Abbreviations: DAT-dative, GEN-genitive, INV-inversion marker, LK-linker, NOM-nominative, PL-plural, and SG-singular.

(1) nakita niya ang lalaki na [nasa taas ng puno].

saw 3SG.GEN ANG man LK be.at height GEN tree

‘He saw the man who was high in the tree.’

(2) dumating ang isa-ng bata-ng lalaki

arrived ANG one-LK young-LK man

na [nakasakay sa bisikleta].

LK was.riding DAT bike

‘There arrived one young man who was riding a bike.’

(3) baka sila ang [kumuha].

probably 3PL.NOM ANG got

‘Probably the ones who got (the pears) are them.’

(4) ang sabi ko sa kanya,

ANG statement 1SG.GEN DAT 3SG.DAT

hindi totoo yung [nakita niya].

not true YUNG saw 3SG.GEN

‘I said to him, what he saw is not true.’ (lit. ‘My statement to him, what he saw is not true.’)

(5) ang [ginawa niya] ay huminto siya sandali.

ANG did 3SG.GEN INV stopped 3SG.NOM awhile

‘What he did, he stopped awhile.’

(6) ang gwapo ko daw.

ANG handsomeness 1SG.GEN hear-by

‘(They said) how handsome I am!’ (lit. ‘(They said) my handsomeness.’)

Blake, Frank R. 1925. A Grammar of the Tagalog language. New Haven: American Oriental Society.

Chafe, Wallace L. 1980. The Pear Stories: Cognitive, Cultural, and Linguistic Aspects of Narrative Production. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

Declerck, Renaat. 1988. Studies on Copular Sentences, Clefts, and Pseudo-clefts. Leuven: Leuven University Press.

Higgins, Francis Roger. 1979. The Pseudo-cleft Construction in English. New York: Garland.

Himmelmann, Nikolaus P. 2004. Tagalog (Austronesian). In Gert Booij, Christian Lehmann and Joachim Mugdan, eds., Morphology: A Handbook on Inflection and Word Formation, vol. 2, 1473-1490. Berlin: de Gruyter.

Himmelmann, Nikolaus P. 2005. Tagalog. In Alexander Adelaar and Nikolaus P. Himmelmann, eds., The Austronesian languages of Asia and Madagascar, 350-376. London: Routledge.

Lambrecht, Knud. 1994. Information Structure and Sentence Form. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lambrecht, Knud. 2001. A framework for the analysis of cleft constructions. Linguistics 39(3):463-516.

Payne, Thomas E. 1997. Describing Morphosyntax: A Guide for Field Linguists. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Schachter, Paul. 1976. The subject in Philippine languages: Topic, Actor, Actor-Topic, or none of the above. In Charles N. Li, ed., Subject and Topic, 491-518. New York: Academic Press.

Nicholls, Sophie

Reference in Spoken Discourse in the Ngukurr Aboriginal Community: The Status of Proper Names

This research focuses on the discourse practices of the two languages that are regularly used in Ngukurr, NT, including Roper River Kriol, an English lexified creole, and Ritharrngu, a traditional Pama-Nyungan language. Natural conversational data gathered from these two languages show strikingly similar patterning in regards to referencing people in discourse, despite Ritharrngu not being considered a substrate influence of Kriol (cf. Munro 2004; Sandefur 1979). Even with language taboos taken into account (cf. Dixon 2002), both languages show a clear preference to use kinship terms, pronouns or other methods to refer to participants in the conversation. Unlike in English discourse, it is not clear at first glance if these references are identifiable as well as specific (rendering them definite), or simply specific.

KRIOL:
 (1).  FLORA:    mai mit bin tok wen nobodi iya tokin agenst thing, lika.
                      My ‘mate’ (of potential husband kingroup) spoke out when nobody here was talking against whatsit, liquor.

RITHARRNGU:
 (2). LARRY:  Gatarra ma:rnda-ya bari .. hancraf-mi-jangh. [first mention]
                        today 3du-EMPH PART    handcraft-reflex-make
                        Today maybe (those) two are doing handcraft.

Prior studies on reference in Australian languages (cf. for example Blythe 2006; Garde 2003; Stirling (to appear)), show a clear tendency towards 'referential minimisation' even when a referent is introduced to the discourse (Garde 2003:189). In this data personal names are minimally used even where the referent may not be identifiable solely by virtue of the kin-term; in these cases other means are often employed by speakers to identify the referent (cf. Garde 2003):

KRIOL:
(3). BESSIE:   na det longwan tallwan boiwan san, im minbala maidi bla wanim,
                        dokta wan.
                        'The 'lanky', tall, boy 'son', he is our, maybe, whatsit, doctor one.'

Additionally though the reference using a kin-term may be specific in nature, it is not necessarily intended as identifiable:
 

KRIOL:
(3).           1 FLORA to BESSIE: Abuji, yu dalim main baba gada luk jeya insaid.
                                                '‘grandmother’, you tell ‘my brother’ to look inside'
            2 ARNOLD:               oah.
                                               'oh'
            3 FLORA:                   dumaji wanbala san du.
                                               'Because a ‘son’ ((was there)) too'

In summary, proper names are not a preferred choice in identifying a referent. We find kinship terms, pronouns and place names have higher referential relevance than do proper names. This creates an unusual hierarchy in information flow as participants in the discourse employ various strategies to clarify the 'highly indirect referring expressions' (Garde 2003:376) used by the speaker. Because this discourse strategy is habitual, it leads to the conclusion that kinship terms, and other descriptive terms are more relevant for the purpose of identifying specific referents than are unique proper names. We can further say that despite the fact that proper names are uniquely referring, if the discourse strategy is predicated not on unambiguous referent identification by hearers (as shown by Garde 2003), but on 'referential minimisation', then it makes sense to use NPs that are specific but not necessarily uniquely identifiable.

The data is drawn from Roper River Kriol and Ritharrngu conversations recorded in Ngukurr community. It has been transcribed and analysed with reference to the frameworks of Chafe (e.g. 1976) and Du Bois et al (2003) as well as Givón (1983; 2001) and Lyons (1999).

Blythe, J. (2006) ‘Referential repair and co-construction in Murriny-Patha conversational narratives’ Paper presented at the Australian Linguistic Society conference, Brisbane, 7-9 July
Chafe, W. L. ( 1976). Givenness, contrastiveness, definiteness, subjects, topics and points of view. Subject and Topic. Charles N. Li, Academic Press: 27-- 55.
Dixon, R. M. W. (2002) Australian Languages Their Nature and Development
Series: Cambridge Language Surveys. CUP
Du Bois, J. W; Lorraine E. Kumpf, and William J. Ashby. (2003) Preferred Argument Structure: Grammar as Architecture for Function, Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Garde, M. (2003). Social Deixis in Bininj Kun-wok Conversation. PhD Dissertation. School of Social Sciences, University of Queensland, Australia.
Givón, T. (1983). Topic continuity in discourse: an introduction. Topic Continuity in Discourse: a quantitative cross-language study. T. Givon. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, John Benjamins. 3: 1-43.    
Givón, T. (2001). Contrastive focus constructions. Syntax. Amsterdam, John Benjamins. 2: 221-251.
Lee, J. & Dickson, G. (2002). State of indigenous languages of the Katherine region. Katherine: Diwurruwurru-jaru Aboriginal Corporation.
Lyons, C. (1999). Definiteness. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Munro, J. (2004). Substrate influences in Kriol: The application of transfer constraints to language contact in Northern Australia. PhD Thesis. Linguistics. Armidale, University of New England, Australia.
Sandefur, J. (1979). An Australian creole in the Northern Territory: A description of Ngukurr-Bamyili dialects (Part 1). Darwin: SIL.
Stirling, L. (to appear). 'Double Reference' in Kala Lagaw Ya narratives. Discourse and grammar in Australian languages. (Eds) I. Mushin and B. Baker.

Nordlinger, Rachel

"It's not what you do, it's the way that you do it": The role of formal theory in language description (Plenary)

In this paper I consider the role that formal linguistic theory can and should play in fieldwork based language description, arguing against the common perception that the two are incompatible.  I argue that the common criticisms of formal theory in language description relate to issues of practice – e.g. ‘tagmemic grammars are impossible to read’, ‘formal theoreticians base their theories on unnatural sentences elicited out of context’ – rather than to the use of formal theory per se.  In fact, when used appropriately, formal linguistic theory is an invaluable tool for empirical discovery, highlighting connections between different parts of the grammar, and bringing to light issues and questions that the researcher may not have thought to investigate otherwise. Thus, when viewed as a tool for language description, a formal theory contributes substantially to our empirical understanding of individual languages leading ultimately to a better-informed and more comprehensive description. In this paper I illustrate this use of formal linguistic theory with examples from my own research on the morphosyntax of Australian Aboriginal languages – in particular on NP NP constructions (joint work with Prof Louisa Sadler (Essex)), and on reciprocal constructions in Murrinh-Patha – highlighting the areas in which my empirical understanding of the languages has been enhanced by the questions posed by the formal theory. I conclude by suggesting some principles of “best practice” for the use of formal linguistic theory within language description in the interests of creating greater synergy between the two approaches.

Rendle-Short, Johanna

Use of the address term mate in Australian English

The term mate is widely used within Australian society, both as a reference term, as in, He’s my best mate, and as a term of address, as in, How are ya going mate? Historically, the term has been identified with attitudes of equality, solidarity, camaraderie and friendship,frequently used by diggers and troops in the late eighteenth and early twentieth century (Wilkes, 1978). As such, the term has typically been identified as a masculine term used by males and for males, and has commonly been associated with those of the working class. Recent discussion in the media and parliament, however, has centred on the use of mate within contemporary Australian settings, focussing on how the term mate encapsulates quintessential notions of what it means to be an Australian.

However, within these recent discussions, there has been minimal distinction between mate as a term of reference and mate as a term of address. In addition, there has been minimal recognition of the way in which mate as a term of address is currently being used in Australian society, with minimal discussion of the fact that it seems to be in the process of undergoing change across a number of parameters, including, whether it is now considered appropriate for women to use the term, whether it is appropriate in both formal and informal contexts, whether it is possible to use the term when addressing strangers, and how it should be interpreted when used in antagonistic circumstances. This paper analyses contemporary use of mate as an address term in two ways. Firstly it discusses the results of a survey that examined current perceptions of mate as a term of address, including who uses mate and who is predominantly addressed as mate. Secondly, it analyses instances of everyday interaction collected from the radio and television over a 4 week period in which callers or radio/TV personalities use the address term mate.

The results show that within contemporary Australian society, the address term mate continues to be a clear marker of Australian identity, with a strong emphasis on equality and friendliness. In terms of gender, mate is still overwhelmingly associated with masculinity and being male, although for young women, this male-centric use of mate appears to be changing. Analysis of the sequential positioning of mate, shows how the inter-turn and intra-turn positioning of the address term mate can change depending on whether it is being used in a friendly or hostile/ironic manner. Overall, the paper concludes that there has been a change in the way in which Australians currently use the address term mate, with its use being broader and more inclusive than early discussions of the term would suggest (e.g. Wilkes, 1978). This paper is particularly timely in light of recent political comments concerning the concept of mateship and whether it should be included within the list of core Australian values.

Keywords:  mate, Australian English, term of address, everyday conversation

Rodríguez Louro, Celeste

Tense and aspect patterns in Argentinian River Plate Spanish

This paper looks at tense and aspect features in contemporary Argentinian River Plate Spanish (ARPS). More specifically, it investigates the uses and functions of the Preterit and the Present Perfect (PP) as in examples (1) and (2) below:

(1)        Marta llegó el mes pasado.
            ‘Marta arrived last month.’ (Preterit)

(2)        Marta ha llegado esta tarde.
            ‘Marta has arrived this afternoon.’ (PP)

My previous research suggests that in ARPS the PP does not follow the anterior-to-perfective grammaticalization path proposed for other Hispanic varieties and generally for Romance. On the contrary, the Preterit overwhelmingly prevails over the PP, making it virtually impossible for the latter to grammaticalize. The present study analyzes the interrelation between a set of purely typological features (such as presence of adverbials, and anterior and perfective aspectual meanings) and some extra-linguistic variables (e.g. gender, generation, educational background). To test uses of the Preterit and the Present Perfect by Argentinian speakers, a questionnaire was designed and used with 50 male and 50 female native speakers of ARPS. Informants were required to complete 30 different blanks using an appropriate verbal form. A Chi-square was then utilized to determine to what extent the presence of temporal and frequency adverbials (such as hoy ‘today’ and ya ‘already’), style, age, education, and gender go hand in hand with Preterit and PP usage. Although most correlations were statistically non-significant, some interesting tendencies are observed, namely (1) contrary to claims by Dahl (1985), time and frequency adverbials play a minor role in triggering uses of the PP in this dialect; (2) similarly to what has been advanced by Squartini and Bertinetto (2000), the PP is used more frequently in formal styles; (3) university-educated subjects and women employ the PP slightly more often. The evidence offered also indicates that the PP is restricted not only to formal contexts but also to expressing emotional relevance, in line with my previous observations on the uses and functions of these forms in ARPS. I conclude this study by putting forth a frequency-based explanation of why adverbials trigger Preterit (rather than PP) usage in this dialect, and providing a sociolinguistic analysis of why women and university-educated informants show a marked preference for the PP in formal styles. Finally, I propose that language change and grammaticalization processes may be better understood as a dynamic interrelation of both typological and extra-linguistic factors.

Key words: Argentinian River Plate Spanish, tense, aspect, Preterit, Present Perfect, grammaticalization, temporal adverbials, sociolinguistic variables

 Dahl, Ö. 1985. Tense and Aspect Systems. New York: Basil Blackwell.

Squartini, M and Bertinetto, P.M. 2000. The Simple and Compound Past in Romance languages. In Dahl, Ö. (ed.) Tense and Aspect in the Languages of Europe, 403-439. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Schembri, Adam & Trevor Johnston

Variable ‘subject’ presence in Australian Sign Language narratives

This paper presents the results from the third study in the ‘Sociolinguistic Variation in Australian Sign Language Project’ (Schembri, Goswell & Johnston, 2006; Schembri & Johnston, in press), an Australian replication of a major project investigating variation in American Sign Language (Lucas, Bayley & Valli, 2001). In this paper, we report on the results of an investigation into the variable presence of ‘subject’ noun phrases in 20 spontaneously produced personal experience narratives collected from 20 native and near-native signers of Australian Sign Language (Auslan). In Auslan, subject arguments may be either absent or expressed overtly as noun phrases. For this study, a total of 977 clauses were transcribed. Of these tokens, 37% contained an overt subject argument and 63% lacked a subject noun phrase – a rate of subject drop comparable to that found in ‘pro-drop’ spoken languages, such as Spanish (Meyerhoff, 2000). Each transcribed clause was coded to test for the possible effects of a range of linguistic and social factors, and these data were analysed using VARBRUL software. None of the relevant social factors (i.e., the gender and age of the signer, whether the signer acquired Auslan from birth from deaf parents or from deaf peers at school) were significant, but a range of linguistic factors did play a role in conditioning the variation in subject presence. The strongest factor was co-reference, with clauses having the same referent as the previous clause most likely to have subject drop. Person and number were both significant, with non-first person subjects being those most likely to be absent. These results are very similar to those reported for spoken languages, such as Spanish (Bayley & Pease-Alvarez, 1997), Portuguese (Paredes Silva, 1993) and Bislama (Meyerhoff, 2000). Moreover, a number of factors that have also reported to be significant for American Sign Language are at work in our data, such as presence of English lexical or grammatical influence in the clause and the co-occurring use of role shift (i.e., the use of imitative gestures that indicate to the addressee that a person other than the signer is being referred to). Verb type was also significant: clauses containing plain verbs (i.e., those that cannot be modified spatially to show subject) favoured subject noun phrase presence, while those including spatial verbs (i.e., those verbs that may use space and/or handshape to refer to the subject) favoured subject drop. Furthermore, our data shows that structural priming also appears to play a role, as null subjects tend to follow other null subjects and pronominal subjects tend to follow pronominal subjects. Overall, our results are similar to those reported for spoken languages where variable presence of subjects appears much more closely linked to the tracking of referents in discourse than to social factors such as gender or social class (Meyerhoff, 2000).

Keywords: sociolinguistic variation, Australian Sign Language, subject drop

Bayley, R. & Pease-Alvarez, L. (1996). Null and expressed subject pronoun variation in Mexican-descent children’s Spanish. In: Arnold, J., Blake, R., Davidson, R., Schwenter, S. & Solomon, J. (Eds.), Sociolinguistic variation: Data, theory, and analysis (pp. 85-99). Stanford: Center for the Study of Language and Information.

Lucas, C., Bayley, R. & Valli, C. (2001). Sociolinguistic Variation in American Sign Language. Washington DC: Gallaudet University Press.

Meyerhoff, M. (2000). Constraints on null subjects in Bislama (Vanuatu): Social and linguistic factors. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.

Paredes Silva, V.L. (1993). Subject omission and functional compensation: Evidence from written Brazilian Portuguese. Language Variation and Change 5.

Schembri, A. & Johnston, T. (in press). Sociolinguistic variation in fingerspelling in Australian Sign Language (Auslan): A pilot study. Sign Language Studies 7:3.

Schembri, A., Johnston, T. & Goswell, D. (2006). NAME dropping: Location variation in Australian Sign Language. In: Lucas, C. (Ed.), Multilingualism and sign languages: From the Great Plains to Australia. Washington DC: Gallaudet University Press.

Siegel, Jeff

Substrate Reinforcement and the Retention of Pan-Pacific Pidgin Features

Many grammatical features of Pacific Pidgin English, New South Wales Pidgin English, and Chinese Pidgin English are attested in Australia and across the Pacific in the 19^th century. These include a postverbal transitive marker im or em, extensive use of a resumptive pronoun he, and the existential/possessive verb got. In each of the expanded pidgins or creoles that emerged in various locations in Australia and the Pacific in the 20^th century, a different subset of these features was retained. For example, the transitive marker is found in all three varieties of Melanesian Pidgin (Papua New Guinea Tok Pisin, Vanuatu Bislama and Solomon Islands Pijin) and in Australian Kriol (spoken in the Northern Territory and the Kimberley region of Western Australia), but not in Hawai‘i Creole. In contrast, resumptive he exists as a predicate marker or subject referencing pronoun in Tok Pisin, Bislama and Pijin, but is not a feature of Kriol or Hawai‘i Creole. On the other hand, got is used for both existential and possessive constructions in Hawai‘i Creole, and in Tok Pisin and Bislama, but only for possessive in Pijin and Kriol.

This paper examines these three Pan-Pacific grammatical features along with five others that were attested in the Northern Territory, Melanesia and Hawai‘i in the 19^th century. It argues that the presence or absence of a particular feature in the five expanded pidgin or creole varieties that developed in these locations can be accounted for by the presence or absence of substrate reinforcement. This occurs when a similar feature exists in the substrate language or languages that were significant when the pidgin was expanding. The most significant substrate languages were those of speakers who were bilingual in the pidgin and who expanded it to meet greater communicative needs, some of them eventually shifting to it as their primary language.

Keywords: pidgin, creole, substrate reinforcement

Simpson, Jane

Language landscapes of children in remote Australia (Plenary)

Many Indigenous communities in remote Australia are multilingual, and often the languages being spoken in the community are rapidly changing. Traditional languages are spoken by some people, but at the same time new languages are being developed based on the interaction of traditional languages, English and an English-based creole. These new languages vary along a continuum. At one end, the way of talking is close to the way many people in rural Australia talk. At the other end are mixed languages, in which the structure of the new language contains words and features of several languages. In the middle of the range are varieties of an English-based creole. Children in these multilingual communities grow up in language landscapes that are often undergoing rapid change. The Aboriginal Child Language Acquisition Project is a longitudinal study recording interactions between pre-school children and their care-givers in three remote Indigenous communities, two of which are targetted by the new Northern Territory National Emergency legislation. In this paper I report on some findings on the variation in language heard by children, looking in particular at differences in the way words are ordered in sentences and in phrases. I place it in the wider context of what can be expected as the children enter the school system.

Skelt, Louise

Conversation and Hearing Loss: Multi-unit questions and interactional competence

Multi-unit questions (that is, questions consisting of two or more units, with at least one unit formally designed as a question) have been described as “an attempt at solving a complex communicative task” (Linell, Hofvendahl and Lindholm, 2003). The current study suggests that multi-unit questions constitute a resource for the management of the potential for understanding problems in interactions between adults with acquired severe and profound hearing impairments and their conversational partners. Videotaped data have been collected from seven interactions, ranging from 11 to 50 minutes in length, between adults with hearing impairments and familiar, experienced conversational partners.  While asking questions, several of these conversational partners visually monitor their hearing-impaired co-interactants for gaze-based non-verbal indications of incipient response. If such indications do not occur before the end of the initial question unit, these partners add further units without any intervening gap, until such time as either an indication of incipient response or an actual response occurs. Multi-unit questions result.  This paper will discuss the role of the multi-unit question in addressing the potentially delicate issues of interactional competence which may arise for adults with severe and profound hearing impairments.

Keywords: conversation analysis, multi-unit questions, hearing impairment, understanding, identity

Linell, P., Hofvendahl, J., and Lindholm, C. (2003). Multi-unit questions in institutional interactions: Sequential organizations and communicative functions. Text, 23(4), 539-571.

Stephens, Mia

Making an Indonesian court seem incomprehensible: Monolingual methods

In 2005 various Australian media reported matters surrounding the arrest, imprisonment and preparations for trial in Indonesia of several Australian women accused of drug-trafficking. These matters are of interest in a number of respects, including the race, class and gender respects which enquiry into prisons undertakes. One aspect which has received little attention is the part played by language in relation to other semiosis concerning these prisoners. Jenkins’ (2002) outline of issues relating to English as an International Language (EIL) and English as a Global Lingua Franca (GELF) provides a framework for observation of these events. It might be argued that a range of media treatments of the material encourage the impression that the Indonesian court is incomprehensible, laying open the issue of its competence to determine the guilt or innocence of those accused.

Underestimating the linguistic expertise of Indonesian participants, referring to variant interpretations with the implication of problems arising in the level of English language competence, questioning the right of the Indonesian court to conduct matters in Bahasa Indonesia, and reporting material from areas of interrogation that would be forbidden in Australia, all contribute to a picture which might be interpreted as questioning the right of overseas jails to hold prisoners of Australian nationality.

Matters concerning this group of prisoners, the courts and prisons dealing with them, and their right to speak, are not analysed in relation to any other Australian people held as prisoners in overseas jails.

Stirling, Lesley & Brett Baker

Pronominal apposition and the status of determiners in Australian languages

A number of Australian languages have a construction involving co-occurrence of a pronoun and co-referring noun (usually in that order) whose grammatical and semantic status is unclear (example 1).

(1)       Nadh              apu+w+an            waaku         nge      uma+n.
            3sfERG          mother+ERG     mat(ACC)    then     make+NF
            The mother was making a mat then.                                                    Kala Lagaw Ya

Blake (2001), following Hale (1973), argues that a range of constructions of this kind are NPs involving a pronoun functioning as determiner, ‘rendering a noun phrase definite’. Stirling (In press), on the other hand, argues that in Kala Lagaw Ya, pronouns and nouns co-occurring in this way are in an appositional relationship. Stirling gives a range of arguments for this, in particular, the fact that adverbs can appear between pronoun and noun, as in (2), and that these NP types can co-occur with other determiners such as demonstratives (3).

(2)       Thana              sinakay           moegitiam+al   koima         si         miyar.
            3pNOM          perhaps          little_boy+PL  many          there    were
            There were probably some other boys there.                                       Kala Lagaw Ya

(3)   Thana   sethabi              moegithap     uruy+n               poyzen        mabayg+aw
      3pNOM  3pRemDem       tiny            creature+ERG      poison         person+GEN

         kulka+nu wan+an.
         blood+LOC put+NF
         These tiny creatures put poison into a person's blood.                     Kala Lagaw Ya

In this paper we consider in more detail the status of these constructions, particularly in the light of such examples as (4), where a pronoun co-occurs with a proper name.

(4)     Na              Ii                sizi             nge         zilami.
         3sfNOM    [name]        from.there  then        run(NF)
            ‘Ii runs from there then.’                                                                                 Kala Lagaw Ya

Such examples should be puzzling semantically under either the appositional or determiner analysis, if we make the common assumption that proper names are ‘uniquely referring’, and so arguably should not require either a pronoun or a determiner. However, other Australian languages also allow determiners to modify proper names, e.g. Gundjeihmi (4) (Evans 2003: 299), Marra (5) (Heath 1981: 351), as does Kriol (6), (7), (8) (Nichols, p.c. and Munro 2004), an Indigenous English-lexifier creole:

(4)     Ya     djang,    na-bang-ni                   Namorrorddo    na-mekge
         yeah  site,        MASC-dangerous-p   [name]                 MASC-ANA.IMM
            ‘Yes, a sacred site for that dangerous Namorrorddo there.’                Gundjeihmi

(5)     ginya      wayburri     liw=Ø-anga,   nanggaya      Birlinggarra-nyindi
         here        southward  turn=3sg-did,  masc.that        [placename]-all
            ‘Then they turned south, to that [place] Birlinggarra.’             Marra

(6)       a.         hu        mob     bin       gu        la         Kukabara_Crik?
                        who     pl         past     go        loc      [placename]
                        ‘Who went to Kookaburra Creek?’

         b.  mela       bin    gu,     en      det    Adam    du     bin     kaman
              12pl       past  go      and    det   [PN]      too    past   come
                   ‘We went, and Adam came along too.’ [Lit. ‘that/the Adam’]    Kriol

(7)       den      main    mami   en        dedi     bin       stat       werk
            then     my       mun     and      dad      past     inch     work

         la       det     olmen-na         det     munanga-na    det    Ol-Jojgonwei
         loc    det    respect-foc      det    whiteman-foc    det    [name]
'Then my mum and dad started to work with that old/respected man,
that whitefella, Old George Conway [well-known landowner from the old days]. Kriol

(8)       wan     lil         bilabong          jeya      la         det       Mishengoj
            one      little     billabong         there    loc      det       [placename]
            'there's a little billabong there at Mission Gorge' [well-known place near Ngukurr]  Kriol

In this paper we set out the parameters of this puzzle, and discuss the kinds of evidence which might bear on determining the grammatical status of pronoun + N constructions in Australian languages, focusing on Kala Lagaw Ya as a case study.  We review the semantic properties and discourse functions of this construction in Kala Lagaw Ya and relevant other constructions in Australian languages, and in particular ask whether semantically these constructions encode definiteness/specificity or whether the pronoun/determiner element is performing some other semantic function, and indeed whether this construction type is functioning the same way in all the languages. We propose that the semantic function of the pronoun/determiner in these cases is the key to its distribution, particularly in the case of proper names. In particular, we argue that the pronoun/determiner has a function which has more to do with managing the hearer’s attention, than with definiteness or specificity per se. If these are determiners, then, they are therefore like the ‘recognitional’ demonstratives described by Himmelman (1996). While various authors have noted the occurrence of patterns in Australian languages like those described here, no general account has yet appeared on their functions in the case of proper names.

Blake, Barry (2001) The noun phrase in Australian languages.  Chapter 28 in Jane Simpson, David Nash, Mary Laughren, Peter Austin & Barry Alpher (eds.)  Forty years on: Ken Hale and Australian languages.  Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.  pp 415-425.
Evans, Nicholas. (2003). Bininj Gun-Wok: A pan dialectal grammar of Mayali, Kunwinjku and Kune. Volume 1. Pacific Linguistics. ANU.
Hale, Ken (1973) Person marking in Walbiri. In S. Anderson & P. Kiparsky (eds.) Festschrift for Morris Halle.  N.Y.: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. pp. 308-344.
Heath, Jeffrey (1981) Marra grammar, texts and dictionary. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.
Himmelmann, Nikolaus P. (1996). Demonstratives in narrative discourse: a taxonomy of universal uses. Studies in anaphora, ed. Barbara Fox. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, John Benjamins. 33: 205-254
Kim, M-H., Stirling, L. & Evans, N.  (2001) Thematic Organization of Discourse and Referential Choices in Australian Languages. Discourse and Cognition, 8.2: pp. 1-21.
Munro, J. (2004). Substrate influences in Kriol: The application of transfer constraints to language contact in Northern Australia. PhD Thesis. Linguistics. Armidale, University of New England.
Stirling, Lesley (In press) Double reference in Kala Lagaw Ya narratives. In Ilana Mushin & Brett Baker (eds.) Discourse and Grammar in Australian Languages Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Strahan, Tania

Definiteness and specificity in West Norwegian

In this paper I will outline an aspect of West Norwegian grammar concerning definiteness, in particular with respect to human nouns. Norwegian, like the other Scandinavian languages, has both a separate definite article lexeme and a definite suffix. West Norwegian is unique among the Scandinavian languages, in that an NP/DP may contain both the separate definite article and the definite suffix, which can be regarded in this instance as an agreement marker. The definite suffix alone on the noun is also grammatical, but the definite article with no agreeing suffix is ungrammatical (this is unusual when compared to Swedish, Danish, and other varieties of Norwegian).

1) eit hus
a house
2) det huset
DEF hus.et
‘the/that house’
3) huset
hus.et
‘the house’
4) *det hus

The definiteness properties of human NP/DPs in West Norwegian are fascinating, for several reasons: Firstly, pronouns contrast with the definite article den, the demonstrative dén and the other demonstrative denna when occurring with nouns referring to humans, including words like ‘boy’ and ‘woman’. Though this is not shown in the English glosses, the meanings are quite distinct.

2) gutten
gutt.en
boy.DEF
‘the boy’
3) den gutten
DEF boy.DEF
‘the boy’
4) han gutten
HE boy.DEF
‘the boy’ (Agreement morphology on the noun shows that the pronoun han is acting
as a determiner.)
5) dén gutten
DEM boy.DEF
‘that boy’
6) denna gutten
DEF boy.DEF
‘this/that boy’

Han gutten with a pronoun article can only be used with a specific referent, while gutten and den gutten are used when the referent is identifiable in a discourse sense, or ‘familiar’ in the sense of Farkas (2002: 220). This appears to contradict von Heusinger’s (2002: 254) claim that ‘there are no sets of specific v. non-specific articles in Indo-European languages.’
Secondly, pronouns can act as determiners (specifiers?) in front of people’s names, which the
definite article cannot do.

7) ho Elisabeth
SHE E.
‘Elisabeth’
8) *den Elisabeth
DEF E.

Thirdly, when a human-noun has a pronoun-determiner, it cannot be modified with a restrictive relative clause; while a human-noun with a definite article must often be followed by a modifying restrictive relative clause. That is to say, a ‘DEF human.noun’ construction does not refer enough to be used on its own.

9) Sjå på ho damo!
look at HER woman.DEF
‘look at that woman!’
10) Sjå på den damo som sitter på hesten!
look at DEF woman.DEF who sits on horse.DEF
‘look at that woman on the horse!’

The example in (10) shows that a human noun preceded by a definite article may be modified by a restrictive relative clause. However, a human noun preceded by a pronoun specifier may not be modified by a restrictive relative clause:

11) *Sjå på ho damo som sitter på hesten!
look at HER woman.DEF who sits on horse.DEF

The sentence is also grammatical with no lexical article, where damo is interpreted as definite determiner rather than demonstrative.

12) Sjå på damo som sitter på hesten!
look at woman.DEF who sits on horse.DEF
‘look at the woman sitting on the horse!’

This is similar to the examples used by Hankamer & Mikkelsen (2002: 4-5) for Danish, illustrating the difference between den hest ‘the horse’ and hesten ‘horse.DEF’. Den hest can only be interpreted with a restrictive relative clause following, while hesten will only be followed by a nonrestrictive relative clause. I will give examples in context of the different determiner options for NP/DPs in West Norwegian which illustrate the difference in specificity between human nouns with definite article versus pronominal determiners.

Farkas, D. (2002). Specificity distinctions. Journal of Semantics, 19, 213-243.
Hankamer, J., & Mikkelsen, L. H. (2002). A morphological analysis of definite nouns in Danish. Journal of Germanic Linguistics, 14, 137-175.
von Heusinger, K. (2002). Specificity and definiteness in sentence and discourse structure. Journal of Semantics, 19, 245-274.

Sutton, Peter

Enclitic cardinal directions

Some Australian languages constantly mark absolute orientation in spatial contexts by means of cardinal directions, while others proceed more or less without the use of cardinals. This may mean that functional explanations for high-cardinal languages like Guugu Yimithirr and Flinders Island (FI) based on hunter-gatherer economics lack sophistication. Uniquely for Australia, FI has both free and enclitic forms of cardinal direction markers. This appears to be rare in global typological terms.  Other languages with enclitic cardinal directions include: Nêlêmwa, a New Caledonian language (Bril 2004, Isabelle Bril personal communication 12/01/2007, and see also Alexandre 2004); Tidore, a West Papuan language spoken on Halmahera island in Indonesia (Scott Paauw personal communication 12/01/2007, alerting me to van Staden 2000); Manambu , a language from the East Sepik area of Papua New Guinea (Alexandra Aikhenvald personal communication 14/01/2007, and see forthcoming); and perhaps Pohnpeian (see  Rehg 1981); apparently also zamgrh or kiZombie (see http://wiki.urbandead.com/index.php/KiZombie).

With only one exception all the languages in the world (located thus far) that have developed enclitic forms of cardinal direction terms belong to seafaring island peoples, including FI. Might not a functional basis for this grammaticalisation, if not for frequency of cardinal direction use itself, hold some water?

Keywords: Cardinal directions; Australian languages; Flinders Island Language; non-Australian languages

Aikhenvald, A.Y., with P.Y.L. Laki (forthcoming), The Manambu language from East Sepik, Papua New Guinea.

Alexandre François 2004. Reconstructing the geocentric system of Proto Oceanic.
Oceanic Linguistics 43:1-32.

Bril, Isabelle 2004. Deixis in Nêlêmwa (New Caledonia). In G. Senft (ed.), Deixis and demonstratives in Oceanic languages. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics.

Rehg, Kenneth 1981. Ponapean reference grammar. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

van Staden, Miriam 2000. Tidore: a linguistic description of a language of the North Moluccas. PhD Dissertation, Leiden University.

Tesan, Graciela & Stephen Crain

Licensing Negative Polarity Items: Evidence from Magnetoencephalography

This study used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to investigate on-line semantic processing. The study investigated the acceptability of the Negative Polarity Item (NPI) any. For a sentence with any to be acceptable, there must be a licensing operator that meets a semantic restriction: it must be downward entailing. This restriction is not met in (1), as indicated by the ‘*’. By contrast, any is licensed by the downward entailing operator, nobody, in (2).

(1) * Everybody at the party ate any of the cheese

(2)    Nobody at the party ate any of the cheese

We investigated the brain signatures of the licensing versus the non-licensing of the NPI any using magnetoencephalography (MEG). This technique allows us to track semantic processing in real time. In analysing the data, we searched for the magnetic equivalents of two components that have been associated with processing linguistic violations in the ERP literature: one is the Early Left Anterior Negativity (Friederici, Pfeifer & Hahne) (ELAN), typically elicited violations of structure-building (syntactic) operations, and the second is the N400 component (Kutas & Hillyard 1980), which is an evoked potential typically associated with subjects’ failure to integrate incoming information (typically plausibility information) into the current linguistic analysis. Our experimental hypothesis was that the detection of semantic anomalies such as (1) should precede the integration processes involved in semantic integration which are associated with the N400 component in the ERP literature.  

So far, we have tested 14 English native-speakers subjects (6 men, 8 women). Each subject read 60 target sentences containing an illicit any within the scope of every, as in (1). As controls, the same 60 sentences were presented to subjects, with nobody replacing everybody. The target and control sentences were embedded in another 120 filler sentences, so each subject viewed a total of 240 sentences. The sentences were presented to subjects in 5 blocks, each consisting of 12 target sentences (everybody/*any), 12 control sentences (nobody/any) and 24 fillers, in pseudo-random order. One of the methodological innovations of the study was that subject’s task, which was not related to the research question (see below). Subjects were simply instructed to read the sentences silently, and respond when the word cheese appeared in any of the sentences.  

ANOVA was conducted using the amplitudes of the averaged RMS values over 5 50-ms windows following the appearance of the word any. Significant differences in subjects’ brain responses to any in the target (non-licensing) condition with everybody, as compared the control (licensing) condition with nobody occurred early in on-line processing, at 350 ms and at 400ms. The findings provide evidence of the on-line computation of negative polarity licensing in a task that does not require subjects to make meta-linguistic judgments about the acceptability of the test sentences. The findings are therefore evidence of people’s automatic processing of semantic anomalies, possibly earlier than the integration processes associated with the N400 in ERP studies. Most importantly, the findings provide a baseline for future work with young children. They constitute a proof of concept that MEG may be used to elicit unconscious decisions from young children about the acceptability of semantically anomalous sentences (presented auditorily). This would be a critical advance in our ability to assess children’s linguistic competence, because children younger than 5-years-old are incapable of making conscious decisions about the acceptability of sentences in behavioural tasks.  

Keywords: negative polarity items, magnetoencephalography, psycholinguistics, semantics, brain imaging

Friederici, A., E. Pfeifer and A. Hahne (1993) Event-related brain potentials during natural speech processing: effects of semantic, morphological and syntactic violations. Cognitive Brain Research : 183-192.

Kutas, M. and S.A. Hillyard (1980) Reading  senseless sentences: brain potentials reflect semantic incongruity. Science 207: 203-205.

Thorton, Rosalind

Explaining Why

Children’s failure to use subject-aux inversion in why-questions as compared with other wh-questions has long been noted. The observation was made 20 years ago by Labov and Labov (1978) in a detailed diary study of their daughter Jessie, and confirmed in Stromswold’s (1990) search of children in the CHILDES database (MacWhinney 2000). The phenomenon has resisted satisfactory explanation, however. The present paper brings a more detailed set of data to the table for investigation. The data are from a diary study of one child, A.L. from 2 to 5;6, incorporating over 900 why-questions. In addition to the previously documented lack of subject-aux inversion, why-questions are associated with a number of other grammatical properties. The data reveal that A.L.’s uninverted why-questions permit ‘intrusions’ of various kinds, as in (1). In (1a), the phrase ‘some of your make up’ is fronted in a question expressing contrastive focus. In (1b) the adverbial ‘this time’ intrudes; PPs are also seen in this position. A subordinate clause appears between why and the main clause in (1c). While subject-aux inversion is absent in matrix questions, questions with a long-distance interpretation show obligatory subject-aux inversion.

(1)     a.   Why SOME OF YOUR MAKE UP, I can’t use? [and some I can]    (5;1)
          b.   Why, this time, you’re opening them like that?                                  (4;2)
          c.   Why, when I was a baby, I loved Boomer’s dog food?                    (3;6)

(2)     a.   Why do you think that B. came in with us?              L-D                    (4;2)
         b.   Why you got waves?                                              Matrix                 (4;2)

Recent studies on French (Rizzi 1990), Italian (Rizzi 1999), Irish (McCloskey 2003), Korean, Japanese and Chinese (Ko 2005) show that why exhibits different behavior from other wh-phrases in many languages. The empirical data lead Ko (2005) to formulate a parameter for why that distinguishes languages that merge/base-generate why high in the phrase structure from those that move why to the ‘normal’ question position. In languages like Italian (Rizzi 1999), merging perché (i.e. why) high results in lack of verb inversion, and the possibility of inserting focus and topic phrases, and subordinate clauses. At the same time, in long-distance questions, why must move from the embedded clause, and it therefore moves to the position reserved for regular wh-phrases, triggering verb movement. 

The cross-linguistic data motivate a parametric explanation of the child data - that children who treat why differently from other wh-phrases have misset the why-parameter, and are treating English ‘like Italian’. The misset parameter means that children merge why high, with lack of subject-aux inversion and the resulting properties in (1) and (2).

The paper will discuss the pros and cons of a parametric solution to the child data. Avoiding a parametric solution in the UG framework requires adopting mechanisms for statistical learning. A usage-based approach fails to be more explanatory. A CHILDES search of input to the Brown children shows that examples like (1a) to (1c) are absent from the adult input to children, suggesting that child pattern of use cannot be based on parental input.

Keywords: child language acquisition; acquisition of syntax

Wahid, Ridwan

Variation in the use of (in)definite articles in native and nativised varieties of English

In this paper I describe variation in the use of (in)definite articles in six varieties of English – Australian English (AusE), New Zealand English (NZE), American English (AmE), Singapore English (SgE), East African English (EAE) and Indian English (IE). Using corpus data, I examine the existing usage types that have been proposed for ‘the’, ‘an/an’ and ‘Ø’ and argue that they are inadequate for capturing patterns of variation exhibited in SgE, EAE and IE, or what are called the 'nativised' varieties of English (Lowenberg 1986. Kachru, 1986). To illustrate, consider the following:

1) Why is it that *the* people in general don’t seem to know these I mean from appearance anyway and from what one hear as in these these not the issues that are often front-ended to any discussion <ICE-SIN:S1B-039#75:1:A>
2) And it is time that we forget this sort of, *a* generalizing, and comes out to grasp that another plan of action…<ICE-IND:S1B-028#106:1:D>
3) Then *Ø* mid-term effect is from that scarring tissue which <-/>which heals now there’s a big fibrous or a big colloid <ICE-EA:S1BINT4T>

Importantly, while the marked patterns of use of these articles in SgE, EAE and IE (and other similar varieties) are often considered ‘erroneous’ by some native standards, I will show that their underlying grammars are largely principled and instead require a different semantic/pragmatic treatment – one that is based on their substrate languages – to account for their variation. Towards this end, the usage types that have been proposed by Hawkins (1978) and Prince (1981, 1992) for ‘the’ and by Huddleston and Pullum (2002) and Quirk et al. (1985) for ‘a/an’ and ‘Ø’ will be complemented with insights from studies on English articles with language contact perspectives (Ionin et al. 2004, Gil 2003 and Trenkic 2002). Among the claims that will be made are: (i) omission of ‘the’ in the nativised varieties is often due to speakers’ expectation of hearers to (uniquely) identify the entity of an NP based on contextual clues, (ii) ‘the’ may mark 'specificity' in the sense that a speaker explicitly indicates possession of knowledge of the NP’s entity to the hearer but does not identify it, and (iii) certain uses of articles are more culturally constrained than they are linguistically.

Gil, D. 2003. English goes Asian: number and (in)definiteness in the Singlish noun phrase. In F. Plank (ed) Noun Phrase Structure in the Languages of Europe (Empirical Approaches to Language Typology, EUROTYP Working Papers VII/20). Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 467-514.
Hawkins, J. 1978. Definiteness and Indefiniteness. London: Croom Helm.
Huddleston, R. and G. Pullum. 2002. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ionin,T., Ko, H. and K. Wexler. 2004. Article semantics in L2 acquisition. Language Acquisition. 12: 3-69.
Kachru, B. 1986. The Alchemy of English. The Spread, Function and Models of Non-Native Englishes. Oxford: Pergamon Press.
Lowenberg, P. 1986. Non-native varieties of English: nativization, norms and implications. Studies in Second Language Acquisition. 8: 1-16.
Prince, E. 1992. The ZPG letter: subjects, definiteness, and information status. In S. Thompson and W. Mann (eds.) Discourse Descriptions: Diverse Analyses of a Fund-Raising Text. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 295-325.
Prince, E. 1981. Toward a taxonomy of given-new information. In P. Cole (ed) Radical Pragmatics. New York: Academic Press. 223-256.
Trenkic, D. 2002. Establishing the definiteness status of referents in dialogues (in languages with and without articles). Working Papers in Research Centre for English and Applied Linguistics. Retrieved on June 5, 2006 from the World Wide Web at www.rceal.cam.ac.uk/Publications/Working/Vol7/Trenkic.pdf.
Quirk, R., Greenbaum, G., Leech, G. and J. Startvik. 1985. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. Harlow: Longman.

Wales, Lynn

Quantified assessments of French speakers’ perceptions of temporal meanings associated with future-referring verbs forms: a study over time

Paper withdrawn.

Walsh, Michael

Is saving languages a good investment? (Plenary)

This title is intended to be provocative. I will address the issues involved mainly by drawing on examples from Australian Aboriginal language groups.

The first question raised by the title is what it actually means to 'save' a language; and linguists are divided here. Some say the whole process is impossible; others have been directly involved for years in some kind of process which might be thought of as 'saving' languages. Even if one believes that there is value in 'saving' languages, some linguists have claimed that attempting to do so is not a good use of linguists' time. These sorts of views are reflected in the title of a paper by the Africanist Paul Newman: 'The endangered language issue as a hopeless cause'.

Another question relates to whether money spent on this process is a good investment. Some assert that saving an Australian Indigenous language contributes strongly to the mental, physical and social health of Australia – particularly for Indigenous people. Others would disagree.

If it is possible to 'save' a language, and doing so is worthwhile, a further question arises: to what extent should the academy be involved in the process? Related to this is the issue of roles: should the process of language revitalization be wholly internal to an Aboriginal community or should linguistic specialists be a part of the process? To date I believe that the academy's role has been fairly marginal.

Whatever one's beliefs around these issues may be, I believe that the questions need to be firmly on the agenda.  Thus in this paper I seek to tease out the range of factors involved, so that these issues can be brought out from the margins and into the centre.

Yap, Foong Ha

Definiteness markers and nominalizers in Malay: Evidence of D-to-C development

This paper examines the relationship between definiteness (i.e. identifiability) and nominalization phenomena. Three nominalizers in Malay (namely, yang, -nya, and punya) are compared to definiteness marker (i)tu, within a grammaticalization framework, and the question of whether nominalizers inherently encode definiteness is addressed.

As highlighted in Figure 1, previous synchronic studies (summarized in van Minde 2003) have identified a wide range of functions for yang, including definiteness marker, topic marker, relative clause marker, nominalizer, and complementizer in factive clause constructions. Our present analysis highlights that definiteness is inherent in all uses of yang. In a conversational analysis of colloquial Indonesian, Englebretson (2003) has also identified a wide range of functions for –nya, namely, third person pronoun, possessive pronoun, definiteness marker, nominalizer, epistemic marker, and adverbial marker. Our analysis likewise shows that definiteness is inherent in all uses of –nya, although more weakly realized with respect to epistemic and adverbial functions. In a diachronic analysis of classical and contemporary Malay, Yap (2003) identifies many similar functions for punya, in particular revealing a N(oun)-to-D(eterminer)-to-C(omplementizer) development as follows: lexical noun empunya ‘master, owner, possessor’ > genitive (em)punya > relative clause marker punya > nominalizer punya > epistemic marker punya/mya. Other uses of punya include pre-adjectival intensifier and cause/reason subordinator functions (arguably via semantic extensions from the genitive construction). Our present analysis shows that, while punya is not grammaticalized as a definiteness marker, many of its grammatical functions also encode definiteness, but this feature is considerably weakened with respect to the epistemic, intensifying, and subordinating functions, with identifiability residing only with the speaker, and no longer shared by the hearer—in other words, identifiability diminishes as semantic extension goes from lexical/relational > (inter)subjective, and syntactic scope expands from core-to-periphery (e.g. Traugott 1995; Tabor & Truagott 1998; Shinzato 2005). As seen in Figure 1, and exemplified in (1a-d) below, a similar weakening in definiteness values can also be seen as uses of distal demonstrative and definiteness marker itu in Malay (equivalent to English that) is extended to epistemic contexts (i.e. an extension from Determiner to Complementizer domains).

Of significant theoretical interest is the retention of definiteness values as determiners evolve into complementizers which head nominalized constructions with referential functions, and significant loss of definiteness values in the case of complementizers which head epistemic and evidential functions. In the case of itu, given that it has grammaticalized into a definiteness marker but not into a nominalizer, we can argue for their intimate yet independent status. That is, while both definiteness marker and nominalizer contribute to the referentiality of nominals, the former focuses on identifiability (Lyons 1999), while the latter focuses more on manipulability (Hopper & Thompson 1984).

Englebretson, Robert. 2003. Searching for Structure: The Problem of Complementation in Colloquial Indonesian Conversation. Studies in Discourse and Grammar 13. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Hopper, Paul J., and Sandra A. Thompson. 1984. The Discourse Basis for Lexical Categories in Universal Grammar, Language 60.4: 703-752.
Lyons, Christopher. 1999. Definiteness. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Shinzato, Rumiko. 2007. (Inter)subjectification, Japanese Syntax and Syntactic Scope Increase. In Onodera, Noriko O. and Ryoko Suzuki (eds.), Historical Changes in Japanese, pp. 171–206. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Tabor, Whitney and Elizabeth C. Traugott. 1999. Structural Scope Expansion and Grammaticalization. In Anna Giacalone Ramat & Paul J. Hopper (eds.), The Limits of Grammalicalization, pp. 227-270. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Traugott, Elizabeth C. 1995. Subjectification in Grammaticalization. In Dieter Stein and Susan Wright (eds.), Subjectivity and Subjectivisation, pp. 37-54.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
van Minde, D. 2003. “More Notes on Malay Yang.” Paper read at the Seventh International Symposium for Malay and Indonesian Linguistics (ISMIL), Nijmegen, The Netherlands, June 26 – 29. [The Pragmatic Function of Malay Yang. To appear in Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium of Indonesian and Malay Linguistics (ISMIL).
Yap, Foong Ha. 2003. On Native and Contact-Induced Grammaticalization: The Case of Malay Punya. Paper presented at the 13th Annual Meeting of the South-East Asian Linguistic Society, University of California, Los Angeles, May 2-4.

Zuckermann, Ghil‘ad

Hybridity versus revivability in language

This paper will suggest that the revival of a no-longer spoken language is impossible without cross-fertilization from the revivalists’ mother tongue(s), resulting in a hybridic typological character of the emerging language.

Furthermore, this paper will seek to find out which language components are more revivable than others. The following figure illustrates a tentative hierarchical generalization:

Unrevivable ← Genius/Spirit/Mindset Phonology Phonetics Semantics Morphology Syntax Lexis → Revivable

The paper will also explore the role of the Congruence Principle:

If a feature exists in more than one contributing language, it is more likely to persist in the emerging language.

I shall propose that in the case of ‘Israeli’, misleadingly a.k.a. ‘Revived Hebrew’, whereas Israeli makeup (forms) has been much looked over, its ‘mindset’ (patterns) has been overlooked. For example, the (hidden) productivity and semantics of the allegedly completely Hebrew system of Israeli verb-templates are often European. The result is that, generally speaking, whereas most forms of Israeli are Semitic, its patterns tend to be European.

            European     ←       Patterns                       Forms       →     Semitic

When one revives a language, even at best one should expect to end up with a hybrid.

Keywords: Israel, Hebrew, Yiddish, sociolinguistics, language and culture, contact linguistics, language revival and survival, revitalization, no-longer indigenous languages, Aboriginal languages, Maori