School of Languages and Linguistics - Theses
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ItemReferential Choice in Pitjantjatjara( 2023)This thesis investigates how speakers choose between different referential forms (lexical noun phrases, pronouns, and argument omission) in The Australian language Pitjantjatjara. Five Pitjantjatjara narratives are explored from an extensive corpus collected by Sasha Wilmoth during fieldwork. This thesis is guided by the theory of Preferred Argument Structure (PAS), a theory about the pattern of alignment of referential forms in particular grammatical roles. It is also guided by a body of literature on argument expression and referential choice, discussed in chapter 2. This thesis adopts two primary Research Questions, the first considering the syntactic factors influencing argument expression in Pitjantjatjara, and the second similarly considering the effects of semantic and discourse factors. Chapter 3 outlines how the coding of the data was approached, and the choices that were made with respect to the analysis of the data. The results are presented in chapter 4, first addressing the two Research Questions separately, then cross-analysing them to determine potential interactions between the relevant factors. The results were both consistent and different from the literature. As expected, humanness was a highly influential factor in the choice of referential form in Pitjantjatjara; human referents patterned differently to non-human referents with respect to their referential form. However, this study departs from prior work in that in Pitjantjatjara, free pronouns were found to be preferred over argument omission, especially when continuing referents through discourse. This contradicts the findings of several previous studies, especially on Australian languages, where null reference was posited to be the most popular method of signalling the continuation of a referent in a narrative.
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ItemWritten feedback in intermediate Japanese L2 classes: Teachers’ and students’ attitudes and practices( 2022)This thesis investigates the attitudes and practices of students and teachers surrounding written feedback in the context of an intermediate Japanese as a Second Language program. Despite the abundance of research investigating written feedback and the factors that influence its implementation and uptake in programs that teach English as an Additional Language, the field of research into second language acquisition has yet to explore written feedback outside of this context in any depth. Hence, the current study aims to begin to address this apparent gap in the existing literature by applying methodologies and theories from previous study to the novel environment of Japanese as a Second Language education. In particular, this was done in order to determine the validity of existing findings outside of the usual context and consider the reasons for any differences in results that might arise. Nine students and two teachers of an intermediate university JSL program provided both qualitative and quantitative data to the study via interviews, surveys, and collection of feedback provided on assignments. Analysis of this data then demonstrated that despite the difference in target language of the educational environment, teachers and students displayed similar attitudes and practices to those that had been observed in previously studied English as an Additional Language learning environments. Thus, the study demonstrates the validity of drawing upon previous literature from English as an Additional Language programs to inform pedagogy in other language learning environments, and facilitates further research on written feedback in environments that teach languages other than English.
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ItemTo have and to hold: the semantics of the proprietive case in Australian languages( 1996)In this thesis I carry out a preliminary typological study on the semantics of the proprietive case in Australian languages. (The details on how far the proprietive is a standard case are discussed in §1.4) Throughout Australia a special proprietive is the main means of expressing the ‘have’ relation, except for a small group of languages on the Arafura coast. (Burarra, the Iwaidjic languages and Tiwi located at the very top of the country, and, most likely, some languages not covered in this survey, use alternate constructions to express proprietive semantics.) Dixon (1972) glosses an affix -yi in Dyirbal as ‘with’ and in his study or the languages of Australia (1980:322 ff.) classes it as a derivational affix. Blake (1987:77 ff.) discusses what he calls a group of ‘pre-case suffixes’ and gives solid argumentation for recognising their relational use, but withholds from attributing them with full blown case status. Dench and Evans (1988:10 ff.) clearly show that the proprietive is a productive case, with relational as well as adnominal scope, and which can derive new lexemes. In fact, the proprietive frequently functions relationally, in the same way as a typical adnominal case like the genitive.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableMorpheme boundary phonotactics in Australian languages( 2021)This thesis considers the relationship between intra-morphemic and inter-morphemic phonotactics in Australian languages. A priori, we might posit that in a given language, the same segmental restrictions would apply within morphemes and across morpheme boundaries, but the consonant clusters found in these environments in Australian languages contradict this assumption. Drawing on data from grammars of 12 languages across the continent (Bardi, Bunuba, Djambarrpuyngu, Gurr-goni, Kayardild, Kugu Nganhcara, Martuthunira, Ngiyambaa, Ungarinyin, Warlpiri, Wubuy and Yidiny), this study highlights both the norms and extremes of phonotactic behaviour in Australian languages. Two approaches are employed in this thesis to determine the extent to which inter-morphemic clusters conform to intra-morphemic phonotactic patterns. The first approach examines static phonotactic constraints, using implicational and frequency-based markedness generalisations and feature-based constraints to survey the surface clusters that occur intra-morphemically and inter-morphemically. The second approach investigates live phonotactic constraints at work on underlying clusters across morpheme boundaries. Using evidence from hardening and lenition alternations, epenthesis and deletion strategies, and loanword adaptation, I show how the surface realisation of consonant clusters across morpheme boundaries is determined by the resolution (or lack thereof) of phonotactic violations. The static and live constraints analyses are complemented by a quantitative study of a corpus in Wubuy, which demonstrates how frequently these clusters are attested in natural speech. The results of this study reflect a continuum of phonotactic patterns: at one end, the languages that allow a far wider range of permitted clusters across morpheme boundaries than morpheme-internally; at the other end, languages where cluster resolution strategies, surprisingly, enforce stronger restrictions inter-morphemically than intra-morphemically.
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ItemSmall stories in everyday Mandarin conversations( 2021)Small stories approach is a relatively recent narrative research framework. It is proposed to foreground the narrative activities that have been under-represented in the prototypical Labovian research paradigm. By definition, small stories are typically fragmented narratives that are not confined within a single speech event and do not encompass a neat categorization of beginning–middle–end. However, even though small stories approach has gained more and more attention in the field of narrative research, few studies have applied this framework in non-European languages including Mandarin. To address this research gap, the present study aims to provide a preliminary yet comprehensive narrative analysis of Mandarin small stories. More specifically, this research focuses on the prevalence, structures and co-construction of small story narratives in Mandarin. To achieve this aim, 21 Mandarin-speaking Chinese students were recruited in Melbourne, Australia. Each participant was assigned into a three-person focus group to have a conversation about their experiences of living in Melbourne since March 2020. All small stories emerged in these sessions were identified with predetermined codes, discourse markers, story prefaces and temporal related clauses. The results show that small stories do exist in Mandarin, and they constitute 45.75% of the conversational data. These small stories occur in various story types which have previously been reported in English and Greek. Therefore, this study generates a datapoint for future cross-linguistic research on the typology of small stories. The findings of this study also reveal the strategies Mandarin speakers use to introduce small stories, establish temporal settings in the story worlds and perform co-construction of small stories. These detailed structural analyses not only enrich our understanding of small stories in Mandarin but also provide a working template for Mandarin narrative researchers to investigate this phenomenon further. Furthermore, this study opens a novel path for researchers to study those formerly under-represented narratives in Mandarin, and more importantly, to tap into the lived experience underlying them (e.g., identity analysis).
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ItemKinship terms and fan identities in Chinese cyberspace( 2021)With more time being spent online, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, online communication is increasingly becoming the norm. As a consequence, the Internet has become a timely and important medium in which to explore the use of language and the construction of identity, particularly in the understudied context of Chinese-speaking cyberspace. While the semantics and pragmatics of Chinese kinship terms have been discussed by scholars, they have not previously been analysed from a sociolinguistic perspective in the context of online communication, where they are used extensively. This thesis addresses this gap. This thesis aims to explore how kinship terms are used in identity negotiation in online communication and their subsequent relationship with gender discourses. Three main research questions are posed: How are kinship terms used as part of the construction of different identities in Chinese-speaking cyberspace? How is fan identity represented and constructed in Chinese-speaking cyberspace? How does communication in Chinese-speaking cyberspace reflect broader discourses of gender and sexuality in China? The thesis focuses on the use of a specific kinship term in cyberspace, ‘wife’ (老婆), which has not been discussed in past studies. The thesis investigates how ‘wife’ is used in the discourse of fans to address the main character in a popular Chinese martial arts TV series, ‘Word of Honor’（山河令）. The thesis draws on third wave sociolinguistic theory and multimodal discourse analysis to undertake this analysis and qualitative data was collected through online ethnography. By analysing fan-created videos and comments about these videos, the thesis argues that the kinship term ‘wife’ is characteristic of a particular ‘fan style’. By examining the diverse social meanings of this kinship terms in different contexts, the thesis further argues that kinship terms gain contextualized meanings through repeated stylistic practices. A potential indexical field of ‘wife’ is generated, and identity categories, such as fans and Ni Su fans emerge and are reinforced through these repeated stylistic practices. The thesis also explores the relationship between fan identity and gender discourses, arguing that the ‘big D’ gender discourses reflected in the ‘small d’ discourse of fan communication reflect heteronormativity and an inherent gender binary, while at the same time, dynamic understandings of gender is increasingly accepted, so that ‘wife’ is increasingly used by female fans to address other female fans to signal solidarity, closeness, humour and a somewhat subversive view of sexuality, which might otherwise be considered taboo in other Chinese-speaking contexts.
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ItemThe Expression of Location in Wumpurrarni English: Continua and Coherence in an Australian Contact Language( 2020)This thesis investigates the expression of static and dynamic location in Wumpurrarni English, a contact language spoken in central Australia which is derived from English, Warumungu, and other nearby contact languages. First, it offers a description of the morphosyntax and semantics of ‘locative phrases’ in the language – phrases which express location and contain a noun phrase plus optional locative markers – and discusses this in comparison to the source languages. Then it analyses the co-occurrence of morphemes in a locative phrase relative to the language they derive from, finding some degree of ‘lectal coherence’ but also a wide range of variation; the usage-based framework of schemas and constructions is applied to understand these findings. The results support the existence of a continuum in Wumpurrarni English but suggest it should be understood as multidimensional rather than linear.
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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 pronominal system of Yaraldi( 1994)The aim of this work is to provide a detailed description of the pronominal system of Yaraldi, an Australian language traditionally spoken around the lower reaches of the Murray River and the Lakes area of South Australia. In this language, pronominals occur both as free forms and as clitics, and a major part of the thesis is occupied by an examination of the syntactic characteristics of pronominals in these two environments. The thesis also includes a description of the morphology which occurs on pronominals in Yaraldi, and some remarks on the functions of pronominals and on discourse factors affecting their distribution. A number of previous authors, including Capell (1956) and Yallop (1975), have proposed analyses of various aspects of the Yaraldi pronominal system, but these descriptions have been less thorough than might be desirable, partly due to lack of data. The publication of a large collection of Yaraldi texts by Ronald and Catherine Berndt in 1993 has made possible the current study. Where appropriate, the analysis proposed by this thesis is compared with those put forward by earlier writers. Although the focus of the thesis is on pronominals, some introductory analysis is also provided of Yaraldi morphology and syntax, and other features of the language that are relevant to an understanding of the pronominal system.
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Item« Un sport de voyous pratiqué par des gentlemen »: Une analyse de la vulnérabilité socio-émotionnelle des athlètes de rugby à XV en France( 2019)La vulnérabilité est un mot à la mode dans le monde du sport d’élite, grâce aux travaux de la chercheuse américaine Brené Brown. Elle suggère qu’il y a du mérite à considérer la vulnérabilité comme un aspect positif de la vie, et un mécanisme pour créer des groupes plus efficaces. Ce mémoire présent une analyse originale sur la vulnérabilité socio-émotionnelle dans le rugby à XV professionnel en France. En utilisant la théorie des champs de Pierre Bourdieu, ce mémoire suggère que l’appréciation de la vulnérabilité socio-émotionnelle parmi les athlètes correspond aux résultats plus satisfaisants sur le terrain. Avec une histoire de masculinité hégémonique forte, où on idolâtre ceux qui représentent une image guerrière, et on s’oppose à tout ce qui représente l’autre, le rugby est un exemple de la force de la résistance française à l’idée d’accepter la vulnérabilité. Malgré cela, les chercheurs et les athlètes eux-mêmes croient que la vulnérabilité devient un élément plus important en créant une équipe gagnante. Ce fait est reflété dans les prédictions théoriques et la recherche de plus en plus abondante, publiées par les auteurs tels que Richard Light, Karen Hägglund, Mark Uphill et al. La recherche présentée ici a des implications profondes pour les études à l’avenir sur la vulnérabilité, dans le rugby à XV en France, et plus généralement le sport, les entreprises de haute performance, la société française et les équipes partout dans le monde.