Selected Papers from the 44th Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society, 2013

Permanent URI for this collection

http://hdl.handle.net/11343/40953

Filters

2014 2
2
Reset filters

Settings
Statistics
Citations
Subject: corpus ×

Search Results

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Item
    Thumbnail Image
    Showing the story: enactment as performance in Auslan narratives
    Hodge, Gabrielle ; Ferrara, Lindsay (University of Melbourne, 2014)
    Language use may be understood as creative and partly improvised performance. For example, during face-to-face interaction, both signers and speakers coordinate manual and non-manual semiotic resources to enact characters, events and points of view. Here we present an early exploration of how enactments—constructed actions and dialogue that are effectively tokens of improvised performance—are patterned throughout Auslan (Australian sign language) narratives. We compare retellings of Frog, Where Are You? and The Boy Who Cried Wolf that were elicited from native and near-native Auslan signers and archived in the Auslan Corpus. We find commonalities and differences between the two narratives and between individuals that contribute insights into the role of enactment for both signers and speakers. This study aligns with views of face-to-face interaction as a multimodal, highly complex semiotic practice of partly improvised performance.
  • Item
    Thumbnail Image
    Relative clauses in Australian English: a cross-varietal diachronic study
    Collins, Peter (University of Melbourne, 2014)
    Research on grammatical change in the Late Modern English period has concentrated almost exclusively on British and American English. This study traces developments in the category of relative clauses in Australian English, seeking to determine whether historical exonormative ties with the ‘Mother Country’ are still in evidence and, if not, whether there is evidence of any alignment with American English, the current centre of gravity in English world-wide. Data derived from two recently compiled Australian corpora, COOEE and AusCorp, which together cover the period of approximately two centuries from the foundation of the first British colony in Australia in 1788 to the present day, are compared with that from ARCHER, a diachronic corpus of British and American English. The results indicate that in developments such as the rise of that-relatives and decline of wh-relatives, Australian English patterns closely with innovative American usage, eschewing the conservatism of its colonial parent.