School of Languages and Linguistics - Theses
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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.
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ItemAn acoustic study of coarticulation: consonant-vowel and vowel-to-vowel coarticulation in four Australian languages( 2012)Acoustic phonetic experiments were conducted with the aim of describing spatial coarticulation in consonants and vowels in four Australian languages: Arrernte, Burarra, Gupapuyngu and Warlpiri. Interactions were examined between coarticulation and factors such as consonant place of articulation (the location of the point of maximal consonantal constriction in the vocal tract), the position of the consonant relative to the vowel (preceding or following), prosodic prominence and language. The principal motivation was to contribute to the experimental literature on coarticulation in Australian languages, given their unusual phonological characteristics. The results of acoustic measurements show that in stop consonant and vowel production, there are systematic contrasts between consonant places of articulation, especially between peripheral (i.e., bilabial and dorso-velar) and non-peripheral categories, and there are clearly discernible consonant place-dependent differences in the degree of vowel-to-consonant and consonant-to-vowel coarticulation. Additionally, consonant place of articulation is seen to strongly modulate vowel-to-vowel coarticulation. As observed in other languages, such as Catalan, Italian and German, the degree of vowel-to-consonant coarticulation is seen to vary inversely with the degree of consonantal articulatory constraint (i.e., degree of tongue dorsum raising), as does the degree of segmental context-sensitivity. However, findings reported in this dissertation suggest that, unlike results reported previously for European languages such as English, anticipatory vowel-to-consonant coarticulation tends to exceed carryover coarticulation in these languages. With regard to prosodic effects on coarticulation, it appears that prominent vowels do not typically undergo localised hyper-articulation or acoustical expansion as in English, Dutch and German. It is concluded that these results support the view that the maintenance of consonant place of articulation distinctions is pre-eminent in Australian languages. The analyses that are presented contribute to an understanding of the role of consonant place of articulation in coarticulation and, more generally, of the relationship between the acoustics and the biomechanics of speech.
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ItemSpeaking from the heart: the heart in language and culture( 2010)This study takes an in-depth look at the meanings of heart in English, the idiomatic phrases and constructions involving heart, and the ways in which culturally-specific beliefs about the heart influence the meanings of heart in different languages. A multidimensional approach is employed, in which a corpus of spoken and written texts is analysed to determine the ways heart is used in naturally occurring language. An informant study was also conducted in order to investigate the conscious associations and folk models of the heart held by English speakers. Finally, a survey of Indigenous language dictionaries and literature on Indigenous ethno-medical beliefs demonstrates how the meanings of heart in different languages can reveal interesting differences in conceptualizations of the body.