School of Languages and Linguistics - Research Publications
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ItemEpistemic authority and sociolinguistic stance in an Australian Aboriginal language(De Gruyter Open, 2019-04-01)Abstract Murrinhpatha, an Aboriginal language of northern Australia, has an initialk-alternation in verbs that has hitherto been resistant to grammatical analysis. I argue thatk-does not encode any feature of event structure, but rather signals the speaker’s epistemic primacy over the addressee. This authority may relate to concrete perceptual factors in the field of discourse, or to socially normative authority, where it asserts the speaker’s epistemic rights. These rights are most salient in the domains of kin, country and totems, as opposed to other topics in which speakers are habitually circumspect and co-construct knowledge. My analysis of thek-alternation thus brings together the typology of epistemic grammar (Evans, Bergqvist, & San Roque, 2018a, 2018b), and a sociolinguistic perspective on stance (Jaffe, 2009).
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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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ItemUniMorph 3.0: Universal morphology(European Language Resources Association (ELRA), 2020-01-01)The Universal Morphology (UniMorph) project is a collaborative effort providing broad-coverage instantiated normalized morphological paradigms for hundreds of diverse world languages. The project comprises two major thrusts: a language-independent feature schema for rich morphological annotation and a type-level resource of annotated data in diverse languages realizing that schema. We have implemented several improvements to the extraction pipeline which creates most of our data, so that it is both more complete and more correct. We have added 66 new languages, as well as new parts of speech for 12 languages. We have also amended the schema in several ways. Finally, we present three new community tools: two to validate data for resource creators, and one to make morphological data available from the command line. UniMorph is based at the Center for Language and Speech Processing (CLSP) at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. This paper details advances made to the schema, tooling, and dissemination of project resources since the UniMorph 2.0 release described at LREC 2018.
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ItemCategory clustering: A probabilistic bias in the morphology of verbal agreement marking(Linguistic Society of America, 2020-06-01)Recent research has revealed several languages (e.g. Chintang, Rarámuri, Tagalog, Murrinhpatha) that challenge the general expectation of strict sequential ordering in morphological structure. However, it has remained unclear whether these languages exhibit random placement of affixes or whether there are some underlying probabilistic principles that predict their placement. Here we address this question for verbal agreement markers and hypothesize a probabilistic universal of category clustering, with two effects: (i) markers in paradigmatic opposition tend to be placed in the same morphological position (‘paradigmatic alignment’; Crysmann & Bonami 2016); (ii) morphological positions tend to be categorically uniform (‘featural coherence’; Stump 2001). We first show in a corpus study that category clustering drives the distribution of agreement prefixes in speakers’ production of Chintang, a language where prefix placement is not constrained by any categorical rules of sequential ordering. We then show in a typological study that the same principle also shapes the evolution of morphological structure: although exceptions are attested, paradigms are much more likely to obey rather than to violate the principle. Category clustering is therefore a good candidate for a universal force shaping the structure and use of language, potentially due to benefits in processing and learning.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableMurrinhpatha personhood, other humans, and contemporary youth(University of Hawaii Press, 2018)The traditional Murrinhpatha conception of personhood is similar to what has been observed in other Australian Aboriginal societies, conceiving of the self as a node in a relational network of kinship. But since town settlement, traditional social roles have been radically reconfigured, with a series of economic and ideological factors conspiring to deprecate the role of young men. Murrinhpatha youth respond by embracing a rebellious sub-cultural identity, drawing on mass- media sources to re-imagine themselves as other types of persons. The Murrinhpatha language makes this re-imagining of personhood unusually explicit, since it uses separate grammatical categories to encode socially recognised “persons” versus other animate beings.
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ItemProsodic words in cyclic derivation: the strange case of Murrinhpatha compound verbs(Springer-Verlag, 2017)Lexical compounding generally works by adjoining a second lexeme either directly to the stem of the first lexeme (as in [sabre-[tooth]]-s), or to the whole inflected form of the first lexeme (as in [milk-[teeth]] ). Murrinhpatha presents a third distinct type, where the adjoined lexeme is attached to a prosodic edge, which may occur either before or after various inflectional affixes, rather than attaching to a fixed morphosyntactic host. “Prosodic compounding” of this type has not been previously attested in natural language. However, I argue that in Stratal Phonology (Bermúdez-Otero 2016), where prosodic constituents are formed and reformed on distinct morphological strata, we may formulate a motivated account in which prosodic compounding fills a typological gap. This account of Murrinhpatha verb morphology offers a structurally motivated alternative to previous accounts that posit a purely stipulative morphotactic template.
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ItemDocumenting Sociolinguistic Variation in Lesserstudied Indigenous Communities: Challenges and Practical Solutions(University of Hawai‘i Press, 2017-01-01)Documenting sociolinguistic variation in lesser-studied languages presents methodological challenges, but also offers important research opportunities. In this paper we examine three key methodological challenges commonly faced by researchers who are outsiders to the community. We then present practical solutions for successful variationist research on indigenous languages and meaningful partnerships with local communities. In particular, we draw insights from our research with Australian languages and indigenous languages of rural China. We also highlight reasons why such lesser-studied languages are crucial to the further advancement of sociolinguistic theory, arguing that the value of the research justifies the effort needed to overcome the methodological difficulty. We find that the challenges of sociolinguistics in these communities sometimes make standard variationist methods untenable, but the methodological solutions we propose can lead to valuable results and community relationships.
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ItemLoan phonology in Murrinhpatha(University of Newcastle, 2015)
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ItemConsonant lenition as a sociophonetic variable in Murrinh Patha (Australia)(Cambridge Journals, 2015)In recent years, the typological and geographic range of languages subjected to sociophonetic study has been expanding, though until now Australian Aboriginal languages have been absent from this subdiscipline. This first sociophonetic study of an Australian language, Murrinh Patha, shows a type of consonant lenition that is notably distinct from the better known examples in Standard Average European languages, effecting /p/ and /k/ primarily in the onset of stressed, usually word-initial syllables. Young men lenite more frequently than older men do, and paternal heritage from the neighboring Marri language group also predicts more frequent lenition. The latter influence may be the result of intense language contact brought about by recent settlement of diverse language groups at the Catholic Mission of Port Keats.
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ItemListening to heavy metal in Wadeye(ANU Press, 2014)