School of Languages and Linguistics - Research Publications

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    Extreme Morphological Shift: Verbal case in Kayardild
    EVANS, NICHOLAS ; NORDLINGER, RACHEL ( 2004-07)
    Kayardild and the other Tangkic languages of Northern Australia are well known for their typologically unusual and complex case systems (Evans (1995, 2003a), Dench and Evans (1988)). Their extensive case stacking properties, and their use of case to mark clausal tense/aspect/mood properties (so called `modal’ case (Evans 1995)) have received much attention in recent LFG literature (Andrews 1996, Nordlinger 1998, Nordlinger and Sadler 2000, Sadler and Nordlinger 2002). In this paper we discuss the phenomenon of ‘verbal case’ (Evans 1995, 2003b), as yet unaddressed in these theoretical accounts, by which nominals are inflected with an alternative set of semantic case markers causing them to inflect like verbs, while still functioning syntactically as nominals. The phenomenon of verbal case poses a number of challenges for theories of morphology and the morphology-syntax interface. We argue that it can be naturally captured in a theoretical model that assumes a strict separation of morphology and syntax, as in LFG. Building on much recent work in LFG-based morphology arguing for a distinction between morphological features (m-features) and syntactic features (s-features) (e.g. Sadler and Spencer 2001, Ackerman and Stump (in press), Sells (in press)), we propose that such a distinction is required at the categorical level also: verbal case converts a nominal stem into a morphological verb, while maintaining its syntactic category of noun. We show how this approach interacts with the constructive case model of Nordlinger (1998) to provide a unified account of Kayardild case at the morphosyntactic level, despite the substantial differences in morphological structure.
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    ALS Hypothetical
    Musgrave, S ; Thieberger, N ( 2005-09)
    A hypothetical scenario prepared by Simon Musgrave and Nick Thieberger and the presentation was by John Henderson (who added his own flourishes).This scenario draws out some significant ethical issues facing linguists, in particular those arising from the use of recording media and, increasingly, from more in depth studies of small, so-called ‘endangered’ languages in use in various contexts. The scenario is a background against which the panel can discuss the issues in character, and it should be made clear to the audience the characters do not reflect on the real-life panel members except in occasional asides, and that any resemblance to any person, living or dead, is inevitable.