School of Languages and Linguistics - Theses
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ItemThe Dynamics of Contemporary Pitjantjatjara: An Intergenerational Study( 2022)This thesis investigates several areas of Pitjantjatjara grammar, drawing attention to the ways in which the language varies between and within generations, and the ways that the language is being both adapted and maintained by young adults. The primary goal of the thesis is to find out how young people are speaking Pitjantjatjara today, against a backdrop of rapid social change and language contact. How does their language use differ in comparison to older generations, and to previous descriptions, and what areas of the grammar are being changed or maintained? Pitjantjatjara is one of only a dozen Australian First Nations languages that have been continuously transmitted since colonisation, and which are still being acquired by children as a first language today. Many Pitjantjatjara speakers have noticed that the language is changing and are concerned about its future. In light of speakers' concerns, which are presented at length, this thesis investigates six topics in the language: phonetics and phonology, verbal morphology, case-marking, possession, nominalisation, and negation. Each of these presents a different picture of a dynamic system in constant flux, with different patterns of variation and change, maintenance and innovation, simplification and complexification. To investigate these issues, a corpus of over 40,000 words was recorded in Pukatja/Ernabella (SA). This corpus was designed to capture spontaneous speech among different generations of women. In addition, I draw upon an annotated collection of previously published texts, from the substantial body of previous description and documentation of the language. A combination of qualitative and quantitative methods is used to investigate variables and grammatical structures of interest. In some areas, such as the phonetics and phonology, there are numerous differences between generations; over a dozen variables are described. In the verbal morphology, there is variation in both derivational and inflectional morphology. This appears to be system-internal, not motivated by language contact, and shows an overall maintenance of a complex and interesting system. The syntax of case is fully maintained, although there is some change in case allomorphy, and a new, innovative use of the inclusory construction that has not been documented elsewhere. Possession is an area where contact-induced change has been reported in many languages, including in Pitjantjatjara. However, variation in this domain appears stable between generations, and influenced by subtle semantic, pragmatic, and lexical factors. Nominalisation shows significant morphosyntactic complexity, which is described in detail. Complex sentence structures utilising nominalisations are being fully maintained, with no reduction in the range or use of subordination constructions among young people. Negation is also an area with significant complexity in Pitjantjatjara, and which is typologically unusual in many respects. While there is currently no variation in negation between generations, there are some differences to previous descriptions, and this can shed light on broader questions of how negation constructions evolve. Overall, my findings do not point to a single identifiable youth variety, a radical break between `traditional' and `contemporary' Pitjantjatjara, or to any significant grammatical borrowing from English. The thesis makes a descriptive and analytical contribution to our understanding of Pitjantjatjara phonology, morphology, and syntax, pointing out several areas of typological and theoretical interest. It also adds to the growing body of work describing variation, change, and contact in contemporary Aboriginal language varieties. The findings of this thesis show the benefits of embedding the study of variation and young people's language within language documentation.
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ItemChildren’s verbal inflection development in Pitjantjatjara: an acquisition sketch( 2021)This thesis reports on a small-scale, naturalistic corpus study of children's verbal inflection development in Pitjantjatjara, an Indigenous language of Central Australia. To date few studies have documented the acquisition of Australian languages, all of which are endangered, and of which only a fraction are currently being learnt by children. This study is grounded in a novel approach recently proposed as a way of reducing barriers to child language documentation in endangered, minority, and under-studied languages, prioritising sketch descriptions at a small scale over the intensive corpora typically required of studies in English and other well-resourced languages (Defina, Hellwig, Allen, Davidson, Kelly, & Kidd, 2021). The data consists of five hours of naturalistic Pitjantjatjara caregiver-child interaction, selected from a larger corpus recorded by Rebecca Defina and several families in Pukatja, South Australia. The recordings feature five focus children (4 boys and 1 girl) in a ‘cross-lagged’ arrangement, with two children recorded at each six month interval between 2;0 and 4;0 years of age, and each interval spanned by at least one child. From this sample, the thesis aims to provide a preliminary characterisation of the nature of the developmental path followed by Pitjantjatjara learners, in relation to the rich, large, yet extremely regular verbal inflectional paradigm. Description is guided by two research questions: ‘What broad trajectory is apparent with regard to the timing and sequence of verbal inflection use?’ and ‘To what extent do children’s inflected verbs show adultlike characteristics, across the span of the sketch corpus?’ Results relating to the trajectory of acquisition suggest a relatively clear pattern in the broad sequence of emergence, with a ‘core group’ of inflectional categories observed early and frequently. These comprise the perfective imperative, present, and past perfective forms. Three broad stages are apparent, with the youngest children’s verbs observed to be few in number and predominantly in the imperative, followed by an expansion in lexical variety and lexeme-specific inflectional ranges (within the core group), from Mean Length Utterance (MLU) 2.0. The rest of the paradigm then begins to be observed from MLU 3.4, or roughly 3 years of age, in low type and token counts relative to the core group. One notable exception is the action nominaliser, an inflectionally integrated nominalising suffix, which is observed with comparable frequency to the core inflections in this third broad stage. Results regarding adultlike characteristics comprise analyses of both function and form. In terms of function, the sketch outlines the range of usages in which children are recorded to use verbs in past perfective, present (imperfective), and future forms. These results largely align with cross-linguistic tendencies: the focus children are seen to use the past/present distinction in relation to complete versus ongoing events before later making temporal distinctions, and they primarily talk about future events with verbs in ‘present’ form (conventionally conveying ‘certain future’ in adult Pitjantjatjara), before later beginning to add the future (potential) marker to their repertoire. The functional analysis also illuminates the particular constructions driving the intriguing prominence of the action nominaliser in the dataset: namely verbal negation constructions (in assertions and prohibitions), and insubordinated purposive clauses (as a ‘requesting’ strategy). In terms of form, results show that overgeneralisation between inflectional verb classes is very rare. Of 451 total verb tokens, only two examples of overgeneralisation are identified once the effects of systematic phonological substitutions are accounted for. Verbs overwhelmingly correspond to inflected forms from the earliest sample, and there is no observed period characterised by omission of suffixes. While a small number of uninflected stem tokens do occur, their nature is ambiguous at this scale, compatible with both prosodic and morphological accounts. A second pattern of omission is also observed, with word-medial stem augment syllables absent from longer words, in a distribution suggesting interaction with emerging metrical structures. Overall, it is hoped that these results will provide a preliminary indication of children’s typical learning pattern in relation to the Pitjantjatjara verbal paradigm, and contribute to the documentation of children’s communication and development in Australian Indigenous languages more broadly. It is also hoped that they add some new data to the existing cross-linguistic literature on how children learn to make use of rich morphology.
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ItemThe core of Mangarla grammar( 2020)Mangarla is a Pama-Nyungan language of the Marrngu subgroup, originally spoken in the Great Sandy Desert of Western Australia. Today, the language is severely endangered with a small number of speakers living in disparate communities outside of traditional lands. This work describes the core grammatical features of Mangarla and examines its linguistic connections to other languages in the region, both related and typologically unrelated, providing insight into the fluidity of individual language varieties in contact. The analysis is based on notes and audio recordings of narratives, elicited data and spontaneous conversations, recorded between 1990 and 1994, in the Kimberley communities of Bidyadanga (formerly La Grange) and Jarlmadangah Burru (formerly Mt. Anderson Station), Derby and Fitzroy Crossing. It is also informed by the work of Kevin McKelson collected between the 1960s and 1980s. All aspects of the language are impacted by its distinctive location, surrounded by three different Nyungic subgroups and the prefixing non-Pama-Nyungan languages in the north. Mangarla’s phonological inventory and lexical classes are similar to those of related suffixing languages, but unlike those further south, Mangarla’s lexicon includes many consonant-final preverbs and particles, which are often monosyllabic. Morphologically, it is a split-ergative system, with nominal arguments (including free pronouns) marked in an ergative-absolutive system while the pronominal clitics in agreement with them are split along nominative-accusative lines. Unlike other members of the Marrngu subgroup where these clitics attach to the verb, Mangarla’s bound pronouns typically encliticise to the first element of the clause or to an optional post-initial catalyst, although pragmatics also impacts on their placement. Other interesting features include the loss of the widespread dative marker and lateral-initial ergative/locative forms, its movement away from complete case-concord to free marking within the NP, and the reduction of verb conjugation classes to three. A large number of complex predicates, formed with a preverbal element and a relatively small number of inflecting verb roots, augment monomorphemic members of the verbal category. Argument structure also displays a degree of flexibility not generally recognised in Australian languages. Clause combining strategies include coordination of full and reduced clauses by parataxis, subordination of both finite and nonfinite clauses, typically employing a small number of case markers as complementisers, and unusually, clause chain cosubordination. The work adds to the knowledge of Pama-Nyungan languages in this remote region and leaves a detailed record of the language for the future use of both the Mangarla and academic communities.