School of Languages and Linguistics - Theses
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ItemLexical Representation in Wubuy( 2023-12)Wubuy is a Gunwinyguan (non-Pama-Nyungan) language traditionally spoken in the lands around the southern part of Blue Mud Bay in Southeast Arnhem Land, Australia. Like other languages of the Gunwinyguan family, Wubuy is highly polysynthetic, with noun classification, productive noun incorporation, complex valency-changing operations, and obligatory realisation of up to two arguments on the verb. What distinguishes Wubuy from its neighbours is its intricate array of phonological alternations and the often extremely complex and opaque interactions between them. The result of this is a language in which words can be very large, consisting of many smaller elements, and each morphological element can have many different phonological realisations depending on its environment. This raises the important question of how such complexity is represented in the minds of speakers. Do speakers store a minimal set of invariant atomic elements — i.e. morphemes, in the form of abstract underlying representations — and apply phonological operations to them during production? Or do they store words as wholes, in their surface phonological forms, and make generalisations about the relations between them? Mainstream generative phonology has almost always assumed the former (e.g. Chomsky & Halle 1968; Kenstowicz 1994), while the latter is espoused by much recent work in morphology (e.g. Blevins 2006; Booij 2010). This thesis uses data drawn from text corpora and my own field elicitation to analyse several areas of Wubuy phonology in detail, including: ‘non-optimising’ empty morph insertion, sonority-conditioned reduplicant shape allomorphy, and several opaque alternations involving putative ‘archiphonemes’ and other abstract segments. In each case, I show that the analytical tools supplied by mainstream generative phonology fail to provide an adequate account of the facts, and that arriving at a solution requires a serious reckoning with the limitations of many of its underlying assumptions. Building on Jackendoff & Audring’s (2020) theory of Relational Morphology, as well as on other currents in the tradition of Construction Grammar, I defend a model of phonology without morphemes, and without underlying representations. In this model, there is no ontological separation between representations and rules (or constraints). The lexicon stores whole words (and larger units) in their surface forms, as well as general schemas that abstract over words that have parts in common. These schemas take over the functions normally attributed to rules or constraints, and phonological alternations are encoded as relations of similarity and difference between full surface word forms. In addition to these theoretical concerns, the thesis significantly extends our understanding of some key empirical phenomena in Wubuy. For one, I present evidence that there is widespread variation in the operation of an opaque deletion process, and that the variation is structured in a way suggestive of a sound change in progress, spreading by lexical diffusion. Further, I present the first detailed account of Wubuy prosody, by means of an Autosegmental-Metrical analysis of a corpus of unscripted narrative texts. In line with work on other languages of the region with complex morphologies, I find that intonational pitch events tend to align with the left edges of major morphological constituents in the verb. I also find evidence of a pitch accent that aligns to the right edge of the verb, and does so in a way indicative of quantity-sensitivity: it anchors to the final syllable of the word if it is heavy, and to the penultimate otherwise. This thesis thus substantially enriches our understanding of phonology-morphology interactions, in the context of a language where both the phonology and the morphology occupy a space close to the upper bounds of complexity.
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ItemArgument realisation in Wubuy( 2018)In Wubuy, a highly endangered polysynthetic language from northern Australia, there are a number of morphosyntactic phenomena that can manipulate how verbal arguments are realised, including causative, affectedness and conjunctive constructions. However, the reasons why these sometimes vary in their effect on argument realisation are unclear, as are the ways they are distributed and constrained. In fact, there are very few descriptions of languages with multiple valency-changing processes that provide detailed accounts of them and how they interact with each other. This is a problem because it means that when we take a given verb, we are unable to predict how (or even if) it can participate in such constructions, nor can we predict what the range of possible interpretations will be. Through a reconsideration of the current corpus and the collection of new data, this thesis uses empirical description and analysis to investigate the distribution and constraints of causative, affectedness and conjunctive constructions in a number of ways, including: considering how a verb’s transitivity, semantic subclass and argument-structure influences its interaction with derivational morphology and the morphosyntactic realisation of arguments; extending investigations past the current (and crosslinguistically) predominant focus on morphological constructions to also include lexical and syntactic ones; and approaching similar construction types in a unified way (e.g. comparing verb agreement strategies in coordinative, comitative and reciprocal contexts of conjunction). In doing so, this thesis not only clarifies the constraints and interactions mentioned above, it also discovers several construction types that were previously undescribed for Wubuy, some of which are also underdescribed in the broader Australian, polysynthetic and crosslinguistic contexts.
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ItemLittle kids, big verbs: the acquisition of Murrinhpatha bipartite stem verbs( 2016)This thesis examines the acquisition of Murrinhpatha, a polysynthetic language of northern Australia, based on semi-naturalistic data from 5 children (1;9-6;1) over a two-year period. It represents the first detailed acquisition study of an Australian non-Pama Nyungan language and thus contributes to a growing crosslinguistic and typological understanding of the process of language acquisition. In particular it focuses on the acquisition of Murrinhpatha bipartite stem verbs and the acquisition of complex inflectional verbal paradigms. These structures pose a number of challenges to the language learner, which raise questions for current theories of morphological acquisition. The structure of this thesis is built around three major research questions. The first aims to describe the characteristics of early verb use in Murrinhpatha both with regard to their structure and their semantics and pragmatics. I describe the development of verb structures in Murrinhpatha finding that these are sensitive to phonological/prosodic factors and not truncated according to morphosyntactic factors. The semantics and pragmatics of early verbs show similarities to English-acquiring children despite the great typological differences of these languages. Secondly I examine the acquisition of the complex inflectional paradigms of Murrinhpatha classifier stems. This system appears to be too complex to allow for abstract rule-based morphological acquisition but also too large to rely on rote learning of individual inflected forms. I find that children begin by using a small core of rote learned inflected forms and gradually expand verb paradigms along predictable pathways relying on low level analogy and semi-regular patterns of inflection. Finally I consider the acquisition of Murrinhpatha bipartite stem verb morphology. These verbs are constructed of two stem elements, a classifier stem and a lexical stem, which co-vary to encode verbal semantics and argument structure. Such a system has not previously been explored from an acquisition perspective, and thus I investigate how children acquire the underlying compositional principles of the system. While children do use bipartite stem morphology contrastively, they are found not to acquire the compositional principles underlying the system in the age range considered. This suggests that the Murrinhpatha bipartite stem verb system is not regular or transparent enough to allow for the acquisition of the principles of compositionality during the earlier stages of development.