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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ItemDevelopment of Second Language Pragmatic Competence at Advanced Proficiency Levels( 2023-11)Whereas much of the research in testing L2 pragmatics has been concerned with learners from low to higher-intermediate levels of proficiency, this study examined the pragmatic performance of advanced L2 learners to identify some of the features that best describe advanced pragmatic competence. To do this, 45 advanced EFL teachers from Chile at B2 and C1 level of the CEFR performed four speaking tasks: two monological and two role-play tasks. Employing a CA-inspired methodological approach, the groups were compared in terms of openings, preliminaries, core action, posterior moves, and closings for both types of task. Findings agree with previous research indicating that as proficiency increased, advanced learners had more access to linguistic resources, successfully marked disaffiliative actions as dispreferred, and identified contextual cues to produce talk. Lastly, the results also suggest that some features of pragmatic competence and interactional competence can be elicited through monologic tasks.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableThe affordances of pedagogical translanguaging in university language teaching and learning( 2023-11)As Australian universities are increasingly recognised as multilingual spaces (e.g., Ollerhead & Baker, 2019; Pauwels, 2014a, 2014b), student cohorts in language courses are also becoming more linguistically and culturally diverse. Taking translanguaging as a conceptual framework (e.g., Li, 2018), this project explores language students’ understanding of the notion of translanguaging and its pedagogical affordances in language learning through recognising prior experiences with and knowledge of languages and linguistic practices as resources (Cummins, 2017; de Jong et al., 2019). As translanguaging is a debated and complex notion (e.g., Bonacina-Pugh et al., 2021; Jaspers, 2018), the conceptual framework of this research includes all its dimensions (e.g., Leung & Valdes, 2019; Slembrouck, 2022) - theoretical, pedagogical, methodological and critical - to investigate its pedagogical potential in multilingual language learning spaces. Within this translanguaging framework, this project draws on the notions of linguistic repertoire (Busch, 2012), translanguaging space and moment analysis (Li, 2011), and post-monolingual research methodology (Singh, 2018, 2019, 2020) to investigate the pedagogical affordances of translanguaging in learning additional languages. In this instance, the term “additional languages” refers to languages other than English that are not a majority language in the chosen context. Through two case studies, the project collected data on language students’ experience of translanguaging (case study 1) and on the affordances of pedagogical translanguaging for beginner Italian learners’ writing skills (case study 2). The findings suggest that students’ understanding of translanguaging occurs through a complex negotiated process that develops through experiential, collaborative and reflective practices facilitated by the pedagogical design purposefully planned by the language teacher. The affordances of pedagogical translanguaging (e.g., Cenoz & Gorter, 2022a) for writing processes are enabled by a preliminary exploration of linguistic repertoires through multimodal biographies such as the language portrait (Busch, 2018) and translanguaging affordances (Garcia & Kleifgen, 2020) planned to leverage shared linguistic repertoires as communicative and semiotic resources. Within this process, language students activate translanguaging practices to achieve enhanced linguistic competence as well as a more autonomous expression of agency and identity in the learning process.
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Item'I told them from my tight blue pants' : the queer challenge to identity in the poetry of Frank O'Hara(University of Melbourne, 1998)
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ItemThe emergence of patterns in second language writing : a sociocognitive exploration of lexical trails(University of Melbourne, 2009)One of the enduring frustrations of the second language learner who has a sound knowledge of grammatical rules is the elusiveness of �naturalness�. Just what constitutes �naturalness� and how central it is to linguistic theory has also been a point of contention amongst linguists. Drawing upon a convergence of sociocultural theory and linguistic emergentism, this is a long-term investigation of the development of four ESL users� written lexicogrammatical patterning. A qualitative methodology (Lexical Trail Analysis) was developed in order to capture a dynamic and historical view of the ways in which the participants combined words. Recurring patterns, i.e. collocations and colligations, were traced in the learners� essays as they prepared for the IELTS exam and later in their university assignments once they entered their university courses. The participants received direct and indirect feedback on their writing and they were interviewed after revising their essays about what motivated their revisions and the history of lexicogrammatical patterns they had used. Selected lexicogrammatical patterns were later tested using the principles of dynamic testing. By tracing selected lexemes chronologically throughout the participants� written production and incorporating insights from the participants, it was possible to observe 1) the ways in which the participants� words are habitually combined, 2) how these combinations are transformed over time 3) why the participants combined words in certain ways and 4) how word combinations are affected by sources such as teacher feedback and reference texts. The analysis reveals that the participants were aware of their L2 patterns and used the feedback process as a forum for experimentation with new combinations. Feedback provided one source of assistance, but the participants noticed and sought to imitate native-like patterning through the use of a range of other resources such as dictionaries, other L2 users and L2 texts. In the gradual process of developing increasingly native-like means of participation, the participants were agents of change, seeking assistance and adapting patterns to suit their changing goals. These findings suggest that resourcefulness in tool use, the ability to imitate and adapt linguistic resources and sociocognitive resources such as memory and attention are paramount in the massive task of internalizing the lexicogrammatical patterning of a second language. This process of language patterning is theorized via a model which encompasses adaptations in the linguistic properties of language patterns as well as adaptations in sociocognitive status.
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ItemAmbiguous subjects : dissolution and metamorphosis in the postmodern sublime, or dear circus aerialist(University of Melbourne, 2008)
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ItemLanguages of the body : Kathy Acker's corporeal sublime(University of Melbourne, 2007)
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ItemThe passion of the soul : sadomasochism and the cultural construction of pain(University of Melbourne, 2006)
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ItemThe passion of the soul : sadomasochism and the cultural construction of pain(University of Melbourne, 2006)
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ItemIn states and up town and down country : poetic landscapes of Richard Hugo(University of Melbourne, 2006)