School of Languages and Linguistics - Research Publications
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ItemLFG and Australian languages(Language Science Press, 2023)Australian languages exhibit many interesting grammatical properties and have featured in LFG-related research since the earliest days of the framework. In this chapter I survey the features of Australian languages that have featured most prominently in work within LFG, and show how they argue strongly for the parallel architecture of LFG and in particular the separation of functional relations at f-structure from phrasal constituency and linearity at c-structure. These morphosyntactic features include non-configurationality and flexible word order, the role of morphology in encoding grammatical relations, case stacking, valence-changing phenomena and complex predicates. I show how the flexibility afforded by LFG’s parallel architecture, which separates c-structure from f-structure with a many-to-many mapping between them, allows for a natural and explanatory account of these properties of Australian languages. In return, the empirical questions prompted by these theoretical analyses and their predictions have led to a more detailed understanding of the intricate grammatical structures of various Australian languages, and explain the appeal of the LFG formalism for fieldworkers engaged in Australian language documentation.
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ItemAn LFG approach to Icelandic reciprocal constructions(Oxford University Press, 2021)
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ItemDemorphologization and deepening complexity in Murrinhpatha.(Oxford University Press, 2020-09-24)This volume explores the multiple aspects of morphological complexity, offering typological, acquisitional, sociolinguistic, and diachronic perspectives.
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ItemWorking at the interface: the Daly Languages project(University of Hawaii Press, 2019)In this paper we present the Daly Languages Project (www.dalylanguages.org), funded by the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, and in collaboration with the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC), which has developed website landing pages for all of the languages of the Daly region of northern Australia. These landing pages provide a useful and usable interface by which a range of users can access primary recordings, fieldnotes, and other resources about the Daly languages; they are powered by a relational database which allows for easy updating, ensuring consistency across the website and allowing for an immediate response to community requests. Moreover, since the website is built with a commitment to open source, it is available for other researchers to adapt to their own projects and language groups. In this paper we discuss the goals and outcomes of the project, the design and functionality of the website landing pages, and advise readers on how they can access and adapt the open-source framework for their own purposes.
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ItemMorphology in Lexical-functional Grammar and Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar(Oxford University Press, 2019)Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG) and Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) are both lexicalist, non-transformational, constraint-based grammatical frameworks. While they differ in many respects, they share a number of fundamental principles relevant to morphological theory and analysis, which guide the overall architecture of the grammar. The two frameworks also share a common commitment to being fully explicit and implementable, with strong links to computational implementations. This chapter provides an overview of the general approaches to morphology and the morphology-syntax interface taken by researchers working within these frameworks, illustrating the relevant aspects of each framework through discussion of morphological phenomena such as multiple exponence, auxiliaries, case stacking, morphotactics and clitics.
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ItemProminent possessor indexing in Gurindji(Oxford University Press, 2019)In Gurindji (Ngumpin-Yapa; Australia) bound forms that index the morphosyntactic features of predicate arguments can also index possessors. In prominent alienable possession constructions, internal possessors that are structural dependents of their possessive phrase are indexed for person and number when sufficiently discourse-prominent (e.g. when contrastively focussed), but otherwise do not trigger agreement. In contrast, possessors in inalienable possession constructions are always indexed by agreement clitics. This chapter proposes that examples of this type are not only semantically different from constructions with phrase-internal alienable possessors, but are also structurally different. While Gurindji presents us with genuine examples of prominent internal possessors, inalienable possessors in Gurindji are neither internal nor external possession in a syntactic sense, but rather are best seen as a third type of possession characterized by apposition.
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ItemSerial verbs in Wambaya(Benjamins - John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2014)
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ItemThe languages of Australia in linguistic research: context and issues(Mouton de Gruyter, 2014)
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ItemConstituency and grammatical relations in Australian languages(Mouton de Gruyter, 2014)
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ItemThe languages of the Daly region (Northern Australia)(Oxford University Press, 2017)This handbook offers an extensive crosslinguistic and cross-theoretical survey of polysynthetic languages, in which single multi-morpheme verb forms can express what would be whole sentences in English.