School of Languages and Linguistics - Research Publications
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ItemYaakov Shabtai and Tel Aviv: "The Terrible Transformation"(Australian Association of Jewish Studies, 2002)
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ItemContext, culture, and structuration in the languages of Australia(ANNUAL REVIEWS, 2003)▪ Abstract Using Australian languages as examples, cultural selection is shown to shape linguistic structure through invisible hand processes that pattern the unintended outcomes (structures in the system of shared linguistic norms) of intentional actions (particular utterances by individual agents). Examples of the emergence of culturally patterned structure through use are drawn from various levels: the semantics of the lexicon, grammaticalized kin-related categories, and culture-specific organizations of sociolinguistic diversity, such as moiety lects, “mother-in-law” registers, and triangular kin terms. These phenomena result from a complex of diachronic processes that adapt linguistic structures to culture-specific concepts and practices, such as ritualization and phonetic reduction of frequently used sequences, the input of shared cultural knowledge into pragmatic interpretation, semanticization of originally context-dependent inferences, and the input of linguistic ideologies into the systematization of lectal variants. Some of these processes, such as the emergence of subsection terminology and moiety lects, operate over speech communities that transcend any single language and can only be explained if the relevant processes take the multilingual speech community as their domain of operation. Taken together, the cases considered here provide strong evidence against nativist assumptions that see linguistic structures simply as instantiations of biologically given “mentalese” concepts already present in the mind of every child and give evidence in favor of a view that sees individual language structures as also conditioned by historical processes, of which functional adaptation of various kinds is most important. They also illustrate how, in the domain of language, stable socially shared structures can emerge from the summed effects of many communicative micro-events by individual agents.
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ItemRelationships formed in dyadic interaction and opportunity for learning(Elsevier BV, 2002-01-01)
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ItemTypologies of agreement: Some problems from Kayardild(BLACKWELL PUBL LTD, 2003)‘that rarity, nouns…, those most reluctant agreers, aggreeing in case, of all categories’ (Plank 1995: 32) In this paper I describe a number of agreement‐type phenomena in the Australian language Kayardild, and assess them against existing definitions, stating both the boundaries of what is to be considered agreement, and characteristics of prototypical agreement phenomena. Though conforming, prima facie, to definitions of agreement that stress semantically based covariance in inflections on different words, the Kayardild phenomena considered here pose a number of challenges to accepted views of agreement: the rich possibilities for stacking case‐like agreement inflections emanating from different syntactic levels, the fact that inflections resulting from agreement may change the word class of their host, and the semantic categories involved, in particular tense/aspect/mood, which have been claimed not to be agreement categories on nominals. Two types of inflection, in particular—‘modal case’ and ‘associating case’—lie somewhere between prototypical agreement and prototypical government. Like agreement, but unlike government, they are triggered by inflectional rather than lexical features of the head, and appear on more than one constituent; like government, but unlike agreement, the semantic categories on head and dependent are not isomorphic. Other types of inflection, though unusual in the categories involved, the possibility of recursion, and their effects on the host's word class, are close to prototypical in terms of how they fare in Corbett's proposed tests for canonical agreement.
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ItemA useful kind of interaction? evaluations by university students of feedback on written assignments(John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2002-01-01)Abstract In content subjects, university teachers hope that students find their comments on written assignments useful contributions to student learning of content and disciplinary writing. However, teachers often do not know what effect this form of interaction has on student readers. In this study we investigated student reactions to teacher feedback in a law subject. Data included teacher feedback written on 76 student assignments, responses by 72 students to a questionnaire about the feedback and interviews with 9 students. Responses from two groups were compared. One group (Group A) comprised students born in Australia or another English-speaking country and those born in non-English speaking countries but who had been residents in Australia for over seven years. The other group (Group B) comprised students born in non-English speaking countries and who had been resident in Australia for less than seven years. The students from both groups were most interested in specific comments on content matters and only half were interested in comments on written expression. Students from Group B were more likely than Group A students to find teacher comments useful for subsequent assignment writing. The responses from all students indicate that although they found teacher comments useful, they were not necessarily totally satisfied with the nature of the feedback.
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ItemThe Lute and the Polyphonist( 2002)
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Item"The Oulipo Forty Years On."( 2002)
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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.