School of Languages and Linguistics - Research Publications
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ItemAustralia and New Guinea(Oxford University Press, 2021)
This handbook presents detailed accounts of current research in all aspects of language prosody, with chapters written by leading experts from various disciplines. The last four decades have seen major theoretical and empirical breakthroughs in the field, many of them informed by interdisciplinary approaches, as reflected in this volume. Following an introductory chapter covering the fundamentals of language prosody research, Parts II and III explore prosody in speech production and in relation to linguistic structure. Part IV provides overviews of prosodic systems across the world, with case studies from Africa, Asia, Europe, Australia and the Pacific, and the Americas. The chapters in Parts V, VI, and VII investigate prosody in communication, in language processing, and in language acquisition (respectively), while Part VIII examines prosody in technology and the arts.
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ItemThe genetic position of Anindilyakwa(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2020-10-01)In this paper, we demonstrate that Anindilyakwa, spoken on Groote Eylandt, East Arnhem Land, is genetically closely related to Wubuy (Gunwinyguan). Anindilyakwa has long been believed to be a family-level isolate, but by a rigorous application of the Comparative Method we uncover regular sound correspondences from lexical correspondence sets, reconstruct the sound system of the proto-language, and suggest how the proto-phoneme inventory derives from the proto-Gunwinyguan system through phonological innovations. Although it has been hinted before that Anindilyakwa and Wubuy are related and together with Ngandi form a subgroup, this hypothesis is not borne out here: while Wubuy and Ngandi have been shown to share a significant amount of core vocabulary and irregular verbal paradigms, Anindilyakwa and Wubuy appear to have undergone separate development for a considerable length of time. Moreover, Anindilyakwa has independently undergone extensive further sound changes, resulting in a language that is phonologically (though not lexically or grammatically) quite unusual in Australia.
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ItemPause acceptability indicates word-internal structure in Wubuy(Elsevier BV, 2020-05)Words in polysynthetic languages, such as the Australian language Wubuy, can be semantically complex and translate into whole phrases in analytic languages such as English. This raises questions about whether such words are like words in English, or whether they are more like phrases. In the following, we examine Wubuy speakers' knowledge of word-internal morphological complexity in a word-preference task, in which we test the acceptability of complex words into which artificial pauses have been embedded at a range of morphological junctures. The results show that participants prefer unmodified words and words with pauses inserted at semantically transparent morphological junctures over words with pauses at other junctures. There is no preference for unmodified words over words with pauses at transparent junctures. These results suggest that speakers have access to some word-internal morphological information, and that complex words may share characteristics of both words and phrases in, for instance, English.