School of Languages and Linguistics

In this thesis I carry out a preliminary typological study on the semantics of the proprietive case in Australian languages. (The details on how far the proprietive is a standard case are discussed in §1.4) Throughout Australia a special proprietive is the main means of expressing the ‘have’ relation, except for a small group of languages on the Arafura coast. (Burarra, the Iwaidjic languages and Tiwi located at the very top of the country, and, most likely, some languages not covered in this survey, use alternate constructions to express proprietive semantics.) Dixon (1972) glosses an affix -yi in Dyirbal as ‘with’ and in his study or the languages of Australia (1980:322 ff.) classes it as a derivational affix. Blake (1987:77 ff.) discusses what he calls a group of ‘pre-case suffixes’ and gives solid argumentation for recognising their relational use, but withholds from attributing them with full blown case status. Dench and Evans (1988:10 ff.) clearly show that the proprietive is a productive case, with relational as well as adnominal scope, and which can derive new lexemes. In fact, the proprietive frequently functions relationally, in the same way as a typical adnominal case like the genitive.

This thesis reports on a small-scale, naturalistic corpus study of children's verbal inflection development in Pitjantjatjara, an Indigenous language of Central Australia. To date few studies have documented the acquisition of Australian languages, all of which are endangered, and of which only a fraction are currently being learnt by children. This study is grounded in a novel approach recently proposed as a way of reducing barriers to child language documentation in endangered, minority, and under-studied languages, prioritising sketch descriptions at a small scale over the intensive corpora typically required of studies in English and other well-resourced languages (Defina, Hellwig, Allen, Davidson, Kelly, & Kidd, 2021). The data consists of five hours of naturalistic Pitjantjatjara caregiver-child interaction, selected from a larger corpus recorded by Rebecca Defina and several families in Pukatja, South Australia. The recordings feature five focus children (4 boys and 1 girl) in a ‘cross-lagged’ arrangement, with two children recorded at each six month interval between 2;0 and 4;0 years of age, and each interval spanned by at least one child. From this sample, the thesis aims to provide a preliminary characterisation of the nature of the developmental path followed by Pitjantjatjara learners, in relation to the rich, large, yet extremely regular verbal inflectional paradigm. Description is guided by two research questions: ‘What broad trajectory is apparent with regard to the timing and sequence of verbal inflection use?’ and ‘To what extent do children’s inflected verbs show adultlike characteristics, across the span of the sketch corpus?’ Results relating to the trajectory of acquisition suggest a relatively clear pattern in the broad sequence of emergence, with a ‘core group’ of inflectional categories observed early and frequently. These comprise the perfective imperative, present, and past perfective forms. Three broad stages are apparent, with the youngest children’s verbs observed to be few in number and predominantly in the imperative, followed by an expansion in lexical variety and lexeme-specific inflectional ranges (within the core group), from Mean Length Utterance (MLU) 2.0. The rest of the paradigm then begins to be observed from MLU 3.4, or roughly 3 years of age, in low type and token counts relative to the core group. One notable exception is the action nominaliser, an inflectionally integrated nominalising suffix, which is observed with comparable frequency to the core inflections in this third broad stage. Results regarding adultlike characteristics comprise analyses of both function and form. In terms of function, the sketch outlines the range of usages in which children are recorded to use verbs in past perfective, present (imperfective), and future forms. These results largely align with cross-linguistic tendencies: the focus children are seen to use the past/present distinction in relation to complete versus ongoing events before later making temporal distinctions, and they primarily talk about future events with verbs in ‘present’ form (conventionally conveying ‘certain future’ in adult Pitjantjatjara), before later beginning to add the future (potential) marker to their repertoire. The functional analysis also illuminates the particular constructions driving the intriguing prominence of the action nominaliser in the dataset: namely verbal negation constructions (in assertions and prohibitions), and insubordinated purposive clauses (as a ‘requesting’ strategy). In terms of form, results show that overgeneralisation between inflectional verb classes is very rare. Of 451 total verb tokens, only two examples of overgeneralisation are identified once the effects of systematic phonological substitutions are accounted for. Verbs overwhelmingly correspond to inflected forms from the earliest sample, and there is no observed period characterised by omission of suffixes. While a small number of uninflected stem tokens do occur, their nature is ambiguous at this scale, compatible with both prosodic and morphological accounts. A second pattern of omission is also observed, with word-medial stem augment syllables absent from longer words, in a distribution suggesting interaction with emerging metrical structures. Overall, it is hoped that these results will provide a preliminary indication of children’s typical learning pattern in relation to the Pitjantjatjara verbal paradigm, and contribute to the documentation of children’s communication and development in Australian Indigenous languages more broadly. It is also hoped that they add some new data to the existing cross-linguistic literature on how children learn to make use of rich morphology.

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.

School of Languages and Linguistics - Theses

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