{"title":"Grammaticalization and (inter)subjectification in an Iranian modal verb: A paradox resolved by Dutch","authors":"S. Koohkan, J. Nuyts","doi":"10.1080/07268602.2021.1982863","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07268602.2021.1982863","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This paper deals with the grammatical and semantic development of a modal verb in four West Iranian languages: gu/ga in Kahangi, gijabon in Semnani, boGostæn/bogostæn in the Takestan dialect of Tati and goan in Vafsi. Field work data demonstrate that, from the perspective of the grammaticalization and (inter)subjectification literature, this verb in these languages poses a challenge. It occurs as a non-grammaticalized full verb and as a grammaticalized auxiliary. Yet the full verb features an arguably more (inter)subjectivized meaning than the auxiliary: the former expresses volition, the latter dynamic, deontic and epistemic modal meanings. The absence of historical data for these languages does not allow the puzzle to be resolved directly, but a comparison with the modal verb hoeven ‘need’ in Dutch, which in the present-day language has properties similar to those of the Iranian verbs, and which has been investigated diachronically, suggests a solution: the present situation may be the result of a convoluted diachronic evolution, in which the semantic and grammatical developments do not align. The case thus demonstrates that one cannot easily draw conclusions from synchronic observations about diachronic relations between forms and/or meanings.","PeriodicalId":44988,"journal":{"name":"Australian Journal of Linguistics","volume":"41 1","pages":"389 - 407"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47288496","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
M. Gale, Angela Giles, Jane Simpson, Rob Amery, David Wilkins
{"title":"What women want: Teaching and learning pronouns in Ngarrindjeri","authors":"M. Gale, Angela Giles, Jane Simpson, Rob Amery, David Wilkins","doi":"10.1080/07268602.2022.2027867","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07268602.2022.2027867","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Ngarrindjeri is one of many Aboriginal languages being actively revived in southern Australia. Women in the Ngarrindjeri community have expressed a desire to speak, read and write their language with the same richness as when it was spoken fluently over 70 years ago. Like many Aboriginal languages, Ngarrindjeri has a rich selection of free and bound pronouns, which express person, number and case, but unlike most other Australian languages, it has a third set of reduced free form pronouns. This tripartite set is used to express discourse saliency and continuing topic, and to definitize noun phrases. This paper addresses the issue of teaching and learning how to use Ngarrindjeri pronouns in traditional ways, but for contemporary purposes. Learning Ngarrindjeri requires understanding grammatical categories such as case that differ substantially from English, plus understanding the use of free forms for discourse saliency, bound forms for continuing topics, and free reduced forms where English uses articles. Finally, it requires memorizing a large number of pronoun forms. We share anecdotes on learning pronouns from individual authors, and a reflection from a young Ngarrindjeri woman. We then propose strategies and resources to make it easier to learn, remember and use the complex, regularized pronoun paradigms of Ngarrindjeri.","PeriodicalId":44988,"journal":{"name":"Australian Journal of Linguistics","volume":"41 1","pages":"477 - 502"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42220104","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Elastic language in academic emails: Communication between a PhD applicant and potential supervisors","authors":"Peyman G. P. Sabet, Samran Daneshfar, Grace Zhang","doi":"10.1080/07268602.2021.1958749","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07268602.2021.1958749","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This paper examines how and why elastic language (EL) is used in email communication between a PhD applicant and potential supervisors. It addresses the factors that are involved in EL use when the genre is the same but speech acts differ, which fills a gap in existing research. Based on a corpus of student–supervisor email correspondence, the forms (elastic quantifiers, intensifiers, possibility indicators, subjectivizers and general stretchers) and functions of EL (mitigation and providing the right amount of information) are investigated. A significant statistical difference in the distribution of the five forms of EL between two types of emails (follow-up emails vs. decline emails) is revealed: follow-up emails are more elastic than decline emails. These two types of emails also have distinct rank order and item-level differences. Four factors affecting the frequency of occurrence of EL are identified: the content of the reply, the number of emails exchanged, the possibility that subsequent emails will be exchanged and the level of rapport established through the emails. The findings are important because understanding how EL is used will enable us to contribute to effective communication in academic discourse and beyond.","PeriodicalId":44988,"journal":{"name":"Australian Journal of Linguistics","volume":"41 1","pages":"263 - 286"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45565271","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ten years of Linguistics in the Pub","authors":"Lauren Gawne, R. Singer","doi":"10.1080/07268602.2021.1974341","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07268602.2021.1974341","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In December 2009 the first ‘Linguistics in the Pub’ event was held in Melbourne. For over a decade Linguistics in the Pub (LIP) has been a space for linguists, language workers and language activists to discuss a wide range of topics, covering practical, theoretical and ethical elements of language work. In this paper we provide an overview of the themes that have emerged from these discussions. LIP events have been in step with major shifts in language documentation over the last decade including the decolonization of research, critical approaches to linguistic data management and engaging in public discourse around minoritized languages. Most importantly, LIP provides a space for peer learning, professional development and engagement with topics beyond core-curriculum for junior researchers, in which LIP creates a transparent and equitable approach to scholarly support. We conclude the article by providing instructions and insights for setting up LIP-style events, for other researchers who are interested in replicating this model of capacity building in language documentation, linguistics more broadly or other disciplines.","PeriodicalId":44988,"journal":{"name":"Australian Journal of Linguistics","volume":"41 1","pages":"376 - 387"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41386534","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Bound, free and in between: A review of pronouns in Ngarrindjeri in the world as it was","authors":"M. Gale, Rob Amery, Jane Simpson, David Wilkins","doi":"10.1080/07268602.2021.1967875","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07268602.2021.1967875","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Ngarrindjeri, a language from southern South Australia, is being revived on the basis of material recorded from 1840 until the 1960s. This material shows a heavy use of three types of pronouns, suggesting a language that is ‘pronoun happy’. When reviving a language, it is essential to know how pronouns work, but the earliest source does not include the kinds of texts that allow analysis of how speakers use pronouns. Texts representing actual connected free speech in Ngarrindjeri are not attested until nearly a century later, by Ronald and Catherine Berndt and Norman Tindale. We compare the forms, meanings and second position distribution of Ngarrindjeri pronouns over time and across sources, considering dialect variation and language change. We show that the pronoun form-meaning pairs in texts recorded in the 1930s and 1940s are consistent with those recorded in the nineteenth century, and so we can have some confidence in using the Berndt and Tindale texts to reconstruct pronoun function. Confidence is further enhanced by showing the similarity in pronoun functions in texts recorded on the same topic from the same speaker, Albert Karloan, by the Berndts and Tindale. This review of Ngarrindjeri pronouns opens up possibilities for language revivalists.","PeriodicalId":44988,"journal":{"name":"Australian Journal of Linguistics","volume":"41 1","pages":"314 - 343"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46246639","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Constraints on subject elision in northern Australian Kriol: Between discourse and syntax","authors":"Connor Brown, Maïa Ponsonnet","doi":"10.1080/07268602.2021.1962807","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07268602.2021.1962807","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Kriol is an English-lexified creole spoken throughout the northern regions of Australia since the beginning of the twentieth century. With documentation and description of the language commencing only in the later decades of the twentieth century, many aspects of Kriol grammar remain under-described, especially within the domains of syntax and pragmatics. This study documents and describes subject elision in Kriol, a process where subject NPs are elided in a range of syntactic and discourse contexts. Through qualitative methods we describe the environments wherein subjects are elided and consider the relationship between elision licensed by the syntactic context, and elision licensed by the discourse context. The analysis reveals that subject elision can be licensed through antecedent–anaphora relations at the level of syntax and through the encoding of unambiguous, continued topics following the beginning of a narrative episode at the level of discourse. We then consider the role of substrate and lexifier sources to account for how subject elision categories may have arisen in Kriol.","PeriodicalId":44988,"journal":{"name":"Australian Journal of Linguistics","volume":"41 1","pages":"287 - 313"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49123449","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The argument structure of the bă construction in Mandarin Chinese: Decontextualized and contextualized perspectives","authors":"Xiujin Yu, Yi Li, Hui Zhang","doi":"10.1080/07268602.2021.1971157","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07268602.2021.1971157","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The properties of the bă construction and the function of the word bă in Mandarin Chinese have long been controversial issues. This paper elaborates the argument structure of the Mandarin bă construction from decontextualized and contextualized perspectives. In decontextualized analysis, the paper argues that the previous treatments of the word bă in the bă construction as an absolutive/accusative/ergative/oblique case marker are not fully satisfactory as they face different problems. It is argued that the bă construction can be treated as an ergative–absolutive construction, where the word bă is not a case marker, but rather a functional word serving as a relator, which helps to distinguish two structural positions, the pre-bă position and the post-bă position, respectively marking an ergative A (Agent) argument and an absolutive P (Patient) argument. The two grammatical roles A and P may subsume various semantic roles, and hence a semantic-role hierarchy for A and P or for ergative and absolutive case in the bă construction can be established. In contextualized analysis, it is found that there exist some constraints on the use of the bă construction in discourse, which appear to be the common features that the bă construction shares with ergative–absolutive constructions in ergative languages.","PeriodicalId":44988,"journal":{"name":"Australian Journal of Linguistics","volume":"41 1","pages":"344 - 375"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41835050","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ongoing change in the Australian English amplifier system","authors":"M. Schweinberger","doi":"10.1080/07268602.2021.1931028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07268602.2021.1931028","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This study takes a corpus-based approach to investigating ongoing change in the Australian English adjective amplifier system based on the Australian component of the International Corpus of English (ICE). The paper analyzes changes in amplifiers across apparent time, with special attention being placed on amplifier–adjective–bigram frequencies, to provide insights into cognitive mechanisms underlying lexical replacement. Specifically, the paper analyzes why the innovative variant really was successful in replacing the traditional amplifier very, while other rivals (e.g. so or pretty) were not. Lexical diversity scores and distinctive collexeme analyses confirm that, in contrast to other rival variants, really specializes on and collocates with a few high-frequency adjectives (HFAs) while being dispreferred by low frequency adjectives. The results of a mixed-effects regression analysis show that the use of really is socially stratified with young speakers preferring really over other variants. In addition, the multivariate analysis shows that the replacement of very by really is a female-dominated change and that the use of really is enhanced by priming. The paper argues that collocating with HFAs leads to deeper entrenchment which, in turn, serves as an advantage in situations where speakers choose between rivalling innovative variants.","PeriodicalId":44988,"journal":{"name":"Australian Journal of Linguistics","volume":"41 1","pages":"166 - 194"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41495023","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Putting time in context: There is no causal link between temporal focus and implicit space–time mappings on the front–back axis","authors":"Yutian Qin","doi":"10.1080/07268602.2021.1920885","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07268602.2021.1920885","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The temporal-focus hypothesis (TFH) states that people’s mental conceptualization of past or future as in front is determined by their cultural attitudes towards time. Whereas previous studies have found that personally and contextually-relevant factors (e.g. studying and visiting experience) can cause people’s attentional focus to shift, and their implicit space–time mappings to change accordingly, the current study instead shows that Chinese participants adhered to a future-in-front mapping and maintained a future-focus irrespective of experimentally-induced or naturally-occurring contextual stimuli and that temporal focus was not a reliable predictor of temporal representation. These findings call into question the generalizability of the TFH and the inherent reliability of its assessment instruments, thus arguing that further replication studies need to be conducted before concluding that implicit space–time mappings are a function of cultural attitudes towards time.","PeriodicalId":44988,"journal":{"name":"Australian Journal of Linguistics","volume":"41 1","pages":"152 - 165"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44119934","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Fricative contrasts and neutralization in Marri Tjevin","authors":"John Mansfield, I. Green","doi":"10.1080/07268602.2021.1957774","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07268602.2021.1957774","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Marri Tjevin is the language of the Rak Thangkurral and Rak Nadirri people of the Daly River region in northern Australia. Unusually for an Australian language, Marri Tjevin has fricatives at all points of articulation /β, ð, ʐ, ʒ, ɣ/, contrasting with phonetically long, voiceless stops /p, t̪, t, ȶ, k/. These series are only contrastive word-medially, while most word-initial obstruents vary freely in stricture and voicing, which constitutes a typologically unusual form of obstruent manner neutralization. Additionally there are two contrastive voiced stops /b, d/, which occur both medially and initially. In this paper we present the first detailed analysis of Marri Tjevin’s system of obstruent contrasts and positional neutralization, as well as reporting an interesting association between phonemic stops and prosodic prominence. We argue that the Marri Tjevin stop/fricative contrast shows distributional and phonetic commonalities with fortis/lenis obstruent contrasts in some other Australian languages, while the association of phonemic stops with prosodic prominence also echoes patterns observed elsewhere in Australia. Thus, while Marri Tjevin’s system of fricative contrast and neutralization is typologically unusual, it shows striking parallels with other Australian phonologies.","PeriodicalId":44988,"journal":{"name":"Australian Journal of Linguistics","volume":"41 1","pages":"220 - 261"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48153383","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}