School of Languages and Linguistics - Research Publications
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ItemLocational pointing in Murrinhpatha, Gija, and English conversations(JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING CO, 2021-12-31)Abstract It has been suggested that the gestural accuracy used by speakers of Australian Aboriginal languages like Guugu Yimidhirr and Arrernte to indicate directions and represent topographic features is a consequence of absolute frame of reference being dominant in these languages; and that the lackadaisical points produced by North American English speakers is an outcome of relative frame being dominant in English. We test this claim by comparing locational pointing in contexts of place reference in conversations conducted in two Australian Aboriginal languages, Murrinhpatha and Gija, and in Australian English spoken by non-Aboriginal residents of a small town in north Western Australia. Pointing behaviour is remarkably similar across the three groups and all participants display a capacity to point accurately regardless of linguistic frame of reference options. We suggest that these speakers’ intimate knowledge of the surrounding countryside better explains their capacity to accurately point to distant locations.
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ItemOn the road again: Displaying knowledge of place in multiparty conversations in the remote Australian outback(Elsevier, 2022-01-01)In this article we examine displays of epistemic status and stance among long-term Anglo-Australian residents of remote communities through a case study of a 2-h interaction by four men who have demonstrated sophisticated knowledge of locations in their region. We show how equal access to knowledge of places is oriented to, as well as how differences in rights to authoritatively claim knowledge emerge in disputes over details of locations which are resolved when it is established that one member can provide more specific or up-to-date knowledge. This study not only contributes to understanding epistemic management practices in contexts where there is a high degree of shared knowledge, but also grounds the exploration of new insights into the ways in which the epistemics of referring to places appear to diverge from what has been described for referring to persons.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableThe dress: Theme and self-presentation in online Australian wedding planning fora(SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC, 2020-02)This investigation of the discourse of Australian women in the ‘new media’ context of online special interest advice fora contributes to theory about the ways in which language encodes cultural practices and mediates the social construction of identity. The linguistic self-presentation of participants in 588 asynchronous written posts to wedding planning fora was analysed. Prevalent themes were identified inductively and the degree to which each identified theme was evident in the data was measured. The study uncovered ways in which group membership criteria were expressed and found that traditional ideals of feminine perfection were reinforced. A focus of the investigation was the ways in which the participants spoke about the wedding dress. At times, it was referred to using personification as though it were a proxy for a lover. On other occasions, it appeared to function as a representation of the writer’s idealized bridal self. It emerged as a highly significant cultural object which conferred a special but temporary identity.
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ItemNarrative in ‘societies of intimates’: common ground and what makes a story(J. Benjamins Pub. Co., 2016-12-31)When the Australian writer Richard Flanagan accepted the 2014 Man Booker Prize for fiction, he said that “As a species it is story that distinguishes us”. While the prize was given for a literary work written in English, Australia and the surrounding regions are replete with a rich diversity of oral traditions, and with stories remembered and told over countless generations and in many languages. In this article we consider both the universality and the cross-cultural and cross-linguistic diversity of various forms of narrative. We explore the question of what a linguistic typology of narrative might look like, and survey some of the literature relevant to this issue. Most specifically, we ask whether some observed differences in narrative style, structure, or delivery could derive from social features of the communities which produce them: their social density, informational homogeneity, and the high degree of common ground they share.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableIntonational rises and dialogue acts in the Australian English map task(Sage Publications, 2002)Eight map task dialogs representative of General Australian English, were coded for speaker turn, and for dialog acts using a version of SWBD-DAMSL, a dialog act annotation scheme. High, low, simple, and complex rising tunes, and any corresponding dialog act codes were then compared. Dialog acts corresponding to information requests were consistently realized as high-onset high rises ((L +)H*H-H%). However low-onset high rises (e.g., L*H-H%) corresponded to a wider range of other "forward-looking" communicative functions, such as statements and action directives, and were rarely associated with information requests. Low-range rises (L*L-H%), by contrast, were mostly associated with backward-looking functions, like acknowledgments and responses, that is they were almost always used when the speaker was referring to what had occurred previously in the discourse. Two kinds of fall-rise tunes were also examined: the low-range fall-rise (H *L-H%) and the expanded range fall-rise (H* + L H-H%). The latter shared similar dialog functions with statement high rises, and were almost never associated with yes/no questions, whereas the low-range fall-rises were associated more with backward-looking functions, such as responses or acknowledgments. The Australian English statement high rise (usually realized as a L* H-H% tune) or "uptalk," appears to be more closely related to the classic continuation rises, than to yes/no question rises of typologically-related varieties of English.