Worrorran Revisited

The focus of this volume is the interdependence of diachrony and synchrony in the investigation of syntactic structure. A diverse set of modern and ancient languages is investigated from this perspective, including Hittite, the Classical languages, Old Norse, Coptic, Bantu languages, Australian languages and Creoles. A variety of topics are covered, including TAM, diathesis, valency, case marking, cliticization, and grammaticalization. This volume should be of interest tosyntacticians, typologists, and historical linguists with an interest in syntax and morphology.

The Languages and Linguistics of Australia: A Comprehensive Guide is part of the multi-volume reference work on the languages and linguistics of the continents of the world. The volume provides a thorough overview of Australian languages, including their linguistic structures, their genetic relationships, and issues of language maintenance and revitalisation. Australian English, Aboriginal English and other contact varieties are also discussed.

This book presents a first comprehensive typological analysis of noun phrases in Australian languages, covering the domains of classification, qualification, quantification, determination and constituency. The analysis is based on a representative sample of 100 languages. Among other points, the results call into question the classic idea that Australian languages tend to lack phrasal structures in the nominal domain, with over two thirds of the languages showing evidence for phrasehood. Moreover, it is argued that it may be more interesting to typologise languages on the basis of where and how they allow phrasal structure, rather than on the basis of a yes-no answer to the question of constituency. The analysis also shows that a determiner slot can be identified in about half of the languages, even though they generally lack 'classic' determiner features like obligatory use in particular contexts or a restriction to one determiner per NP. Special attention is given to elements, which can be used both inside and beyond determiner slots, demonstrating how part of speech and functional structure do not always align. The book is of interest to researchers documenting Australian languages, as well as to typologists and theorists.

For nearly four decades, Ian Keen has been an important, challenging, and engaging presence in Australian anthropology. Beginning with his PhD research in the mid-1970s and through to the present, he has been a leading scholar of Yolngu society and culture, and has made lasting contributions to a range of debates. His scholarly productivity, however, has never been limited to the Yolngu, and he has conducted research and published widely on many other facets of Australian Aboriginal society: on Aboriginal culture in ‘settled’ Australia; comparative historical work on Aboriginal societies at the threshold of colonisation; a continuing interest in kinship; ongoing writing on language and society; and a set of significant land claims across the continent. In this volume of essays in his honour, a group of Keen’s former students and current colleagues celebrate the diversity of his scholarly interests and his inspiring influence as a mentor and a friend, with contributions ranging across language structure, meaning, and use; the post-colonial engagement of Aboriginal Australians with the ideas and structures of ‘mainstream’ society; ambiguity and indeterminacy in Aboriginal symbolic systems and ritual practices; and many other interconnected themes, each of which represents a string that he has woven into the rich tapestry of his scholarly work.

The dynamics of language, culture and identity are a major focus for many linguists and cognitive and cultural researchers. This book explores the inextricable connection that language has with cultural identity and cultural practices, with a particular emphasis on how they contribute to shaping personal identity. The volume brings together selected peer-reviewed papers from the 7th International Conference on Language, Culture and Mind with other specially commissioned chapters. Like the conference, this book aims to enhance mutual understanding among researchers from diverse disciplinary and theoretical perspectives, offering a wealth of insights to a wide range of readers on recent culturally oriented cognitive studies of language.

The present volume collects contributions addressing different aspects of the measurement of linguistic differences, a topic which probably is as old as language itself but at the same time has acquired renewed interest over the last decade or so, reflecting a rapid development of data-intensive computing in all fields of research, including linguistics.

This volume aims to make a contribution to codifying the methods and practices linguists use to recover language history, focussing predominantly on historical morphology. The volume includes studies on a wide range of languages: not only Indo-European, but also Austronesian, Sinitic, Mon-Khmer, Basque, one Papuan language family, as well as a number of Australian families. Few collections are as cross-linguistic as this, reflecting the new challenges which have emerged from the study of languages outside those best known from historical linguistics. The contributors illustrate shared methodological and theoretical issues concerning genetic relatedness (that is, the use of morphological evidence for classification and subgrouping), reconstruction and processes of change with a diverse range of data. The volume is in honour of Harold Koch, who has long combined innovative research on understudied languages with methodological rigour and codification of practices within the discipline.