School of Languages and Linguistics - Theses
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ItemA grammar of Mian, a Papuan language of New Guinea( 2007)This is a descriptive grammar of the eastern dialect of the Mian language, spoken by approximately 1,800 people in Papua New Guinea. The grammar comprises chapters on the segmental and tonal phonology, morphology, and syntax and concludes with a text collection. (For complete abstract open document)
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ItemA Grammar of Kuuk Thaayorre( 2006-07)This thesis is a comprehensive description of Kuuk Thaayorre, a Paman language spoken on the west coast of Cape York Peninsula, Australia. On the basis of elicited data, narrative and semi-spontaneous conversation recorded between 2002 and 2005, this grammar details the phonetics and phonology, morphosyntax, lexical and constructional semantics and pragmatics of one of the few indigenous Australian languages still used as a primary means of communication. Kuuk Thaayorre possesses features of typological interest at each of these levels. At the phonological level, Kuuk Thaayorre possesses a particularly rich vowel inventory from an Australian perspective, with five distinct vowel qualities and two contrastive lengths producing ten vowel phonemes. It is in the phonotactic combination of sounds that Kuuk Thaayorre phonology is particularly noteworthy, however. Kuuk Thaayorre’s tendency towards closed syllables (with codas containing up to three consonants) frequently leads to consonant clusters of as many as four segments. Kuuk Thaayorre is also cross-linguistically unusual in allowing sequences of its two rhotics (an alveolar tap/trill and retroflex continuant) within the syllable – either as a complex coda or as onset plus syllabic rhotic. Finally, monosyllables are ubiquitous across all Thaayorre word classes, despite being generally rare in Australian languages.
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ItemNon-subject arguments in Indonesian( 2001-10)The grammatical function subject can be identified reliably in Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian), but the same is not true of other clause-level nominal constituents in the language. The tests proposed in previous studies for identifying an object grammatical function turn out to be unreliable and inconsistent when the full range of data is considered. This thesis attempts to clarify the problem by examining non-subject arguments in Indonesian in the theoretical framework of Lexical-Functional Grammar. Both the properties associated with the various types of argument and the means by which they are licensed in clauses turn out to be problematic. Two argument verbs appear in a range of clause types which are related in interesting ways. I argue that it is possible to give a coherent analysis of the system as a whole, treating it as the basic transitive system of the language, when certain relationships are recognised as morphological rather than syntactic. This analysis also reveals similarities between Indonesian and more conservative Austronesian languages such as those of the Philippines. Another type of clause, sometimes referred to as the ‘adversative verb’ clause type shares an important property with one of the types of transitive clause, that of allowing an oblique argument to appear without a licensing preposition if it is adjoined to the verb which governs it.
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ItemTirax grammar and narrative: an Oceanic language spoken on Malakula, North Central Vanuatu( 2009)This work provides the only description of the grammar and narratives of Tirax, an Oceanic language spoken in three villages on Malakula, North Central Vanuatu. The data on which the work is based was collected by the author during a three-month fieldtrip to Malakula in 2004, with a short follow-up fieldtrip in 2007, and regular correspondence for final fact-checking. Tirax has many features typical of North Central Vanuatu languages, such as obligatory subject-mood markers distinguishing realis and irrealis mood, ‘inalienable’ and ‘alienable’ possessive marking, a range of possessive classifiers for alienable possession, verbal behaviour in the numeral system, ‘nuclear’ verb serialisation, and a range of strategies for paratactic linkage. Additionally, several morphosyntactic processes, such as object marking and plural marking, are sensitive to the animacy of the referent. The pattern of distribution of some of the grammatical features identified in the language was studied to determine their discourse-pragmatic function. In particular, aspect markers and NP markers encoding definiteness and number arc grammatically optional in Tirax, and it is found that they are strategically used by speakers for marking prominence or otherwise engaging the hearer in the narrative. The work therefore represents a novel approach to language description, highlighting the relationship between discourse and grammar. A holistic analysis of the narratives was undertaken, studying the prosodic, morphosyntactic and discourse-semantic layers of structure. This holistic, integrated approach has revealed the existence of transition clauses, hitherto undescribed discourse structures which are frequently encountered in Tirax. Appendices include illustrative texts, a methodology for identifying intonation units, and a description of Tirax phonology. There is also a CD ROM version of this work with links to illustrative audio clips.
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ItemA sketch grammar of the Badjala language of Gari (Fraser Island)( 2003)This thesis is a sketch grammar of the Badjala language of Gari (Fraser Island), and is the result of a fresh transcription and analyses of taped material recorded by Professor Stephen Wurm (now deceased), in 1955, 1960 and 1962 with Gaiarbau, the main informant and one of the last speakers of Badjala. These recorded sessions were conducted on Stradbroke Island and Brisbane, before this elderly man passed away in 1964. All of this material was entered into a computer database, and many examples from this corpus are included within the body of the thesis. Relevant sections from this material is contained in the appendices to this thesis, in the form of sentence examples in Badjala with a free English translation, as well as an alphabetically arranged Badjala wordlist. The thesis comprises five chapters. Chapter 1 deals with The language and its speakers, referring to the historical situation, the spelling of language names, the present language custodians, and the scope of the present study. It also discusses the linguistic type of the language, its relationship to other languages in the region and previous work carried out on Badjala. Chapter 2 analyses the phonetics and phonology of the language. Chapter 3 is concerned with nominal morphology (including the case system). Nominals, nouns, personal pronouns, interrogatives, demonstratives, locational qualifiers and adjectives. Adverbs and particles are also dealt with in this chapter. Chapter 4 is concerned with the morphology and tense, aspect and mode inflections of verbs in Badjala, as well as the derivational morphology of verbs. Finally Chapter 5 examines the syntax of this language, including the main clause, the structure of the noun phrase, and the syntax of complex clauses.
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ItemRedeveloping the IPSyn metric to code the grammatical complexity of children's written language( 2009)The Index of Productive Syntax (IPSyn) was developed as a measure of grammatical complexity in children. However, IPSyn and other measures of children's grammatical complexity such as MLU, are not designed for the use with the language of children over the age of five. Therefore, these measures are only designed to be used with spoken language and not written data. There is no suitable metric currently available to analyse the grammatical complexity of primary school aged children's written language when using corpus data. This study applies the IPSyn to a corpus of narratives written by 145 primary school aged children (prep to grade six), analyses the insufficiencies of IPSyn when coding this data, and proposes a revised model that is more suited to children's written language. The revised model is used to recode a subset of the original corpus, and results are compared with the original IPSyn scores, as well as set of subjective scores assigned by primary school teachers regarding the grammatical complexity of the stories.