The way that language and music are matched to create a well-formed song differs across singing genres and languages. This article analyses how text and music align in a set of Warlpiri women’s songs of the yawulyu genre from the Lander River region of central Australia. It proceeds by investigating whether a previously identified set of constraints governing how words are put to music in a different corpus of yawulyu songs applies to a further set of yawulyu songs considered here, which we refer to as the Kiirnpa song series. Both sets of songs are from the Lander Warlpiri region. It emerges that one constraint must be revised, and an additional constraint is observed in this corpus, while the preferred weighting of constraints differs in interesting ways.

Language use may be understood as creative and partly improvised performance. For example, during face-to-face interaction, both signers and speakers coordinate manual and non-manual semiotic resources to enact characters, events and points of view. Here we present an early exploration of how enactments—constructed actions and dialogue that are effectively tokens of improvised performance—are patterned throughout Auslan (Australian sign language) narratives. We compare retellings of Frog, Where Are You? and The Boy Who Cried Wolf that were elicited from native and near-native Auslan signers and archived in the Auslan Corpus. We find commonalities and differences between the two narratives and between individuals that contribute insights into the role of enactment for both signers and speakers. This study aligns with views of face-to-face interaction as a multimodal, highly complex semiotic practice of partly improvised performance.

Research on grammatical change in the Late Modern English period has concentrated almost exclusively on British and American English. This study traces developments in the category of relative clauses in Australian English, seeking to determine whether historical exonormative ties with the ‘Mother Country’ are still in evidence and, if not, whether there is evidence of any alignment with American English, the current centre of gravity in English world-wide. Data derived from two recently compiled Australian corpora, COOEE and AusCorp, which together cover the period of approximately two centuries from the foundation of the first British colony in Australia in 1788 to the present day, are compared with that from ARCHER, a diachronic corpus of British and American English. The results indicate that in developments such as the rise of that-relatives and decline of wh-relatives, Australian English patterns closely with innovative American usage, eschewing the conservatism of its colonial parent.

This paper deals with non-restrictive infinitival relative clauses (NIRCs) in English (e.g. An independent review, to be funded by the health authority, has been commissioned). The purpose of this paper is twofold: (i) to give an accurate description of the semantic properties of the NIRC on the basis of the British National Corpus, and (ii) to elucidate restrictions on the use of this construction. My corpus-based approach will clarify four types of shades of meaning expressed by this construction are equal to those expressed by IS TO construction (i.e. plan, necessity or appropriateness, future in the past, and possibility). I will stress that NIRCs are used only when they have one notional category (i.e. notional subject/object), which is highly likely to be a notional subject of the infinitive, and denote one of the shades of meaning rather than causality.

This paper summarises the characteristics of loanwords, especially the ways in which they are adapted to the structure of the borrowing language, and surveys the various tests that have been provided in both the general historical linguistics literature and Australianist literature for identifying the fact and direction of borrowing. It then provides a case study of loanwords out of and into the Arandic languages; the other languages involved are especially Warlpiri but to some extent dialects of the Western Desert language. The primary focus is on the phonological adaptation of loanwords between languages whose phonological structure differs especially in the presence vs. absence of initial consonants, in consequence of earlier changes whereby Arandic languages lost all initial consonants. While loanwords out of Arandic add a consonant, it is claimed that loanwords into Arandic include two chronological strata: in one the source consonant was preserved but the other (older) pattern involved truncation of the source consonant. Reasons for this twofold behaviour are presented (in terms of diachronic and contrastive phonology), and the examples of the more radical (older) pattern are individually justified as loanwords, using the criteria discussed earlier in the article.

Boabs, a close relation of the African baobabs, are found only in the Kimberley region of Western Australia and a region close by in the Northern Territory. Here several of the words for the boab tree and its parts are examined with special emphasis on loanwords which cross language family boundaries going in a west-east direction. It is proposed that this linguistic diffusion may reflect dispersal of the tree into new areas on the east, in relatively recent times. On the other hand another recent diffusion from the west of new salient functions of the boab fruit spread a new term to central Kimberley where boabs are known to have been present and used by humans for many thousands of years.

Psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic researchers (e.g. Townsend & Bever 2001; Ullman 2004) have presented evidence for dual route models of human language processing. This paper provides additional linguistic evidence. While some novel English words are straightforwardly combinatorial (e.g. un-Eddie-like), many headlines illustrate morphological memory-based operations that do not follow the standard combinatorial route. Such phenomena are not limited to the outputs of creative English-speaking subeditors. Nicknames in Polish, French, Indonesian and English demonstrate this second morphological route at work in everyday conversations. Similarly, for inflectional morphology, Pinker (1998) argues for dual routes: one route for regular forms, and a second for irregular as well as high-frequency inflectional forms. In this paper, these arguments are extended to syntactic co-ordination, demonstrating how syntactic intricacies flow from a neurolinguistically and psycholinguistically grounded model.

This paper presents initial findings from first research into the prosodic system of Torau, an Oceanic language of Papua New Guinea. Intonation, the use of pitch over grammatical units larger than the word, may convey distinctions at a number of levels in the grammar of a language. This paper looks at it in relation to the pragmatic categories of focus and topic, using data collected in 2010 and 2012. Taking an Autosegmental-metrical approach, it is argued that intonational prominence in the form of a H* pitch accent is a correlate of focus – pragmatically new or inaccessible information. While prosodic and pragmatic prominence frequently align in Torau, there are some instances where the focus entity is not prosodically marked as expected. These cases are briefly addressed, and some paths for further investigations are suggested. It is hoped that this research can be used in typological work on intonation and the information structure-prosody interface, and encourage research into the intonational systems of lesser described languages.

Causation is usually described as consisting of two main types: direct and indirect causation. These are often conceptualised as the poles of a semantic continuum, and crosslinguistically, this semantic continuum reflects a pattern of grammaticalisation/ lexicalisation (Shibatani 1976, c.f. Comrie 1981, Shibatani and Pardeshi 2001). However, this tendency has received little attention within the Australian context, where the focus has been on morphological causative forms. I begin to address this gap by considering how both morphological and syntactic methods are used to express causation in Wubuy, a language from northern Australia. I find that direct causation can generally be expressed via morphological derivational processes, whereas indirect causation cannot. When the causation is indirect, Wubuy speakers favour a syntactic construction that has never before been described for this language and which is also typologically uncommon for Australian languages more generally: indirect speech. This both contradicts Heath’s (1984: 559) claim that Wubuy has no indirect speech construction and supports the crosslinguistic generalisations in the literature.

In Wubuy (Northern Australia), nouns can be productively incorporated into verbs and adjectives. A longstanding controversy in linguistics has revolved around the question of whether these constructions are syntactic (derived by movement) or lexical (formed in the lexicon). Here I show that the arguments which may be linked to incorporated nouns show rather more freedom than generally supposed, and in this respect display similarities to compounding. I propose an analysis using aspects of Construction Morphology (e.g. B. Baker, 2008; Booij, 2010a) but with the crucial difference that incorporation structures always admit a phrasal interpretation, rather than a lexical one.

Changing usage patterns of modal and quasi-modal auxiliaries in English varieties in the past 50 years (Collins 2009; Leech 2003 Millar 2009) have been given explanations in terms of theories of politeness, democratisation and decolonisation (Collins 2005; Leech 2003; Millar 2009; Myhill 1995). This paper uses a folklinguistic approach to explore how Australian English speakers attend to these ideas in their associations with these words. An online survey and eight interviews were conducted, containing an imitation section, which looked specifically at what modal auxiliaries participants thought the identity categories BOGAN, LARRIKIN, and POSH would use in both a high and low obligation context; and an interpretation section, which asked participants for their views on the speakers in four quotes containing a modal auxiliary verb. The results indicate that participants held three main associative groupings around the modal and quasi-modals, which are discussed in this paper in conjunction with ought to, must, had better and need to.

The development of Australian English (AusE) has been well-documented but some features dwelling on the margins of the ‘standard’ have also remained on the fringes of research. These inheritances are unacknowledged not only with respect to their origins but also, in many cases, their transported stigma. This paper outlines the approach of our ongoing project to thoroughly document these ‘non-standard’ and ‘marginal’ morphosyntactic, syntactic and discourse features. Through a discussion of youse, (embellished) clippings and final particle but we aim to demonstrate the value of wholly documenting features, studying their descriptive and interactional aspects and their social evaluation using diverse data. As it continues, this work will not only provide us with a much fuller understanding of these features and their place in contemporary AusE, but it will also serve as a model for inclusive linguistic research linking micro linguistic detail and whole cultures.