ABSTRACT In Persian, two of the verbal constructions used for expressing futurity – the Past Simple and the Future Simple – are built around the past form of the main verb. This paper seeks to demystify this connection between the past and the future by investigating how these past forms contribute to the expression of futurity and setting this within an overall analysis of the future constructions

ABSTRACT The relationship between the distribution of nominalizers in Lhasa Tibetan and the argument/adjunct property of relevant syntactic elements is approached from a generative perspective. The distribution of nominalizers in Lhasa Tibetan demonstrates a regular pattern. Some nominalizers are bi-functional in that they can mark both participant and event nominalizations while others are uni-functional

ABSTRACT An iconic pattern across spoken languages is that words for ‘this’ and ‘here’ tend to have high front vowels, whereas words for ‘that’ and ‘there’ tend to have low and/or back vowels. In Italian, there are two synonymous Italian words for ‘here’, namely qui and qua, and two synonymous words for ‘there’, lì and là. Qui ‘here’ and là ‘there’ are iconic because qui has the high front vowel /i/

ABSTRACT This paper examines the nominal category of stage-of-life words used in English address practices and presents an analysis of their interactional uses and meanings made adopting the principles and methods of ethnopragmatics. The paper has a twofold aim: (i) to highlight the polysemous nature of English stage-of-life words and make a clear distinction between their reference and address meanings;

ABSTRACT Barngarla is a Thura-Yura Pama-Nyungan language originally spoken on the Eyre Peninsula, South Australia and adjacent northern hinterlands. This paper proposes various etymologies and supports the Barngarla language reclamation. Reflecting Barngarla epistemology and traditional ecological knowledge, toponyms are intimately connected to place name reclamation and language reclamation. Delineating

ABSTRACT Ngarrindjeri is one of many Aboriginal languages being actively revived in southern Australia. Women in the Ngarrindjeri community have expressed a desire to speak, read and write their language with the same richness as when it was spoken fluently over 70 years ago. Like many Aboriginal languages, Ngarrindjeri has a rich selection of free and bound pronouns, which express person, number and

ABSTRACT This article seeks to identify traces of language contact between speakers of Australian languages and speakers of Austronesian languages other than Macassans. I put forward evidence for lexical borrowing into northern Australian languages from Austronesian languages in South and East Sulawesi, Maluku and Timor-Rote, as well as from Austronesian languages of the Sama-Bajau and Oceanic subgroups

ABSTRACT The quotative system – lexical and morphosyntactic strategies for the direct reporting of speech and thought – has undergone a major transformation in mainstream World Englishes. Diachronic studies of quotation in Australian, British, Canadian and New Zealand English have all documented the same trends: a relatively stable system, using a small number of quotative variants, becomes more varied

ABSTRACT In this study, I revisit the linguistic properties of wan ‘finish/complete’ in Chinese and provide a syntactic account. I demonstrate that wan is undergoing a process of grammaticalization from being a lexical item to a functional one. I also argue that because of this process, wan is found in different places in syntax. As a main predicate, it is projected in the head of the VP; in contrast

ABSTRACT Ngarrindjeri, a language from southern South Australia, is being revived on the basis of material recorded from 1840 until the 1960s. This material shows a heavy use of three types of pronouns, suggesting a language that is ‘pronoun happy’. When reviving a language, it is essential to know how pronouns work, but the earliest source does not include the kinds of texts that allow analysis of

ABSTRACT In December 2009 the first ‘Linguistics in the Pub’ event was held in Melbourne. For over a decade Linguistics in the Pub (LIP) has been a space for linguists, language workers and language activists to discuss a wide range of topics, covering practical, theoretical and ethical elements of language work. In this paper we provide an overview of the themes that have emerged from these discussions

ABSTRACT This paper deals with the grammatical and semantic development of a modal verb in four West Iranian languages: gu/ga in Kahangi, gijabon in Semnani, boGostæn/bogostæn in the Takestan dialect of Tati and goan in Vafsi. Field work data demonstrate that, from the perspective of the grammaticalization and (inter)subjectification literature, this verb in these languages poses a challenge. It occurs

ABSTRACT This paper reports a cross-genre study of how academics engage their audiences in two popular but underexplored academic genres: academic blogs and Three Minute Thesis (3MT) presentations. Based on a corpus of 65 academic blog posts and 65 3MT presentations from social sciences, we examine how academics establish interpersonal rapport with non-specialist audiences with the aid of engagement

ABSTRACT This study takes a corpus-based approach to investigating ongoing change in the Australian English adjective amplifier system based on the Australian component of the International Corpus of English (ICE). The paper analyzes changes in amplifiers across apparent time, with special attention being placed on amplifier–adjective–bigram frequencies, to provide insights into cognitive mechanisms

ABSTRACT Different classifications of existential clauses (ECs) have been proposed in the literature, including structural classifications, classifications according to the source construction and classifications according to the functions performed by ECs. However, no serious attempt has been made to typologize ECs according to the semantic nature of the most essential element of the construction

ABSTRACT Marri Tjevin is the language of the Rak Thangkurral and Rak Nadirri people of the Daly River region in northern Australia. Unusually for an Australian language, Marri Tjevin has fricatives at all points of articulation /β, ð, ʐ, ʒ, ɣ/, contrasting with phonetically long, voiceless stops /p, t̪, t, ȶ, k/. These series are only contrastive word-medially, while most word-initial obstruents vary

ABSTRACT Kriol is an English-lexified creole spoken throughout the northern regions of Australia since the beginning of the twentieth century. With documentation and description of the language commencing only in the later decades of the twentieth century, many aspects of Kriol grammar remain under-described, especially within the domains of syntax and pragmatics. This study documents and describes

ABSTRACT This paper examines how and why elastic language (EL) is used in email communication between a PhD applicant and potential supervisors. It addresses the factors that are involved in EL use when the genre is the same but speech acts differ, which fills a gap in existing research. Based on a corpus of student–supervisor email correspondence, the forms (elastic quantifiers, intensifiers, possibility

ABSTRACT In this paper, I present a comparative analysis of caused-motion events (involving placement, removal, causation and transfer) in Spanish and German within an emerging Cognitive Construction Grammar theory of mind and language. The aim of this article is to offer a syntactic account by which argument structure information is required to understand the encoding of transferred object/target

ABSTRACT In many languages of northern Australia with coverb constructions, it is difficult to draw a distinction between predication and adverbial modification because coverbs appear to be both predicates and modifiers. We present evidence from Wagiman that a distinction between predication and modification can be drawn syntactically. We argue that Wagiman has two necessarily predicational positions

ABSTRACT A merger exists in Australian English in which /el/ is realized as [æl] for a number of speakers, particularly in Victoria. There have also been some observations of /æl/ raising to [el], termed “transposition”. Although thought to be characteristic of older speakers, empirical evidence for transposition is scant. Here we report the discovery of substantive degrees of merging in thirteen older

ABSTRACT This paper is a lexical study of rations – flour, sugar, tea and tobacco – in Australian languages. The distribution of food played an important role in relations between Aboriginal people and colonizers: this study complements existing historical and ethnographic work on the topic by investigating the lexicon of rations in a set of 197 languages across Australia. We discern a number of patterns

ABSTRACT This article argues that an English split question consists of two parts, a wh-question and an it-cleft. The former serves as a topic and is located in [Spec, TopP] and the latter as a comment and is in the complement position of Top. In the first part, the wh-phrase moves from its base position within TP to [Spec, CP] for the purpose of typing the clause as WH-interrogative. The second part

ABSTRACT In this paper, we demonstrate that Anindilyakwa, spoken on Groote Eylandt, East Arnhem Land, is genetically closely related to Wubuy (Gunwinyguan). Anindilyakwa has long been believed to be a family-level isolate, but by a rigorous application of the Comparative Method we uncover regular sound correspondences from lexical correspondence sets, reconstruct the sound system of the proto-language

ABSTRACT This study explores semantic relevance between internally-headed relative clauses (RCs) and main clauses in Korean, and argues that semantic relevance is caused by the encoding strategy of an internally-headed RC, which is shared by perception-verb complements. An internally-headed RC is distinguished from a gap RC in that the head noun appears in the RC as a full noun. Previous studies have

(2020). Subordination in English: Synchronic and Diachronic Perspectives. Australian Journal of Linguistics: Vol. 40, No. 3, pp. 391-396.

(2020). Encyclopaedia of Linguistics and Applied Linguistics / Yuyanxue Yu Yingyong Yuyanxue Baike Quanshu. Australian Journal of Linguistics: Vol. 40, No. 3, pp. 402-403.

ABSTRACT Indigenous loanwords comprise an important component of the lexicons of the Englishes of former British colonies. Often these words are used as placenames, which are in turn transported across the country with little knowledge of their origin or meaning. In this article we trace the adoption of gunyah into Australian English, and its use in the house name and toponym Miegunyah/Meigunyah/Mygunyah

(2020). Words That Go Ping: The Ridiculously Wonderful World of Onomatopoeia. Australian Journal of Linguistics: Vol. 40, No. 3, pp. 400-401.

(2020). Borrowing: Loanwords in the Speech Community and in the Grammar. Australian Journal of Linguistics: Vol. 40, No. 3, pp. 396-400.

ABSTRACT Languages adopt a number of strategies to avoid dispreferred phonotactic structures. The general pattern is that such strategies involve minimum departure from the input form. One of these strategies is epenthesis. With epenthesis, the minimum departure from the input form is usually the addition of a singleton consonant or a singleton vowel. We show that Alawa and Marra have epenthetic CV

ABSTRACT We discuss two unrelated languages, Jingulu (Mirndi, non-Pama-Nyungan) and Mudburra (Ngumpin-Yapa, Pama-Nyungan), which have been in contact for 200–500 years. The language contact situation is unusual cross-linguistically due to the high number of shared nouns, tending to an almost shared noun lexicon. Even more unusually, this lexicon was formed by borrowing in both directions at a relatively

(2020). The Crucible of Language: How Language and Mind Create Meaning. Australian Journal of Linguistics: Vol. 40, No. 3, pp. 388-391.

ABSTRACT The clitic =lku in Warlpiri and Warlmanpa (Ngumpin-Yapa, Pama-Nyungan, Australia) has been previously analyzed as a ‘change of state’ marker indicating some proposition is false at an earlier time, and true at a later time. In this paper, I examine a number of uses of =lku, which require expanding and refining the ‘change of state’ analysis, in order to argue for a new analysis of =lku as

ABSTRACT Many studies have shown that, owing to the constraint of working memory capacity, language users prefer shorter dependency distances. However, these studies, which are all based on dependency distances in sentences or texts, leave the question unanswered: does noun phrase structure also demonstrate the tendency of dependency distance minimization? To answer this question, the article, based

ABSTRACT This study examined the use of personal (exclusive first-person plural pronouns) and impersonal (abstract rhetors, periphrastic passives and it-clauses) authorial references in a corpus of 160 research articles in applied linguistics, psychology, environmental engineering and chemistry. The aim was to see if personal and impersonal authorial references, as realized by the rhetorical options

ABSTRACT This paper introduces the Australian English Bilingual Corpus, a Russian–English spoken corpus, and uses it for a comparison of automatic time alignment between two different languages. Automatic forced alignment is gaining popularity in corpus research as it allows for time-efficient processing of phonetic information. The Language, Brain and Behaviour: Corpus Analysis Tool is one aligner

ABSTRACT Persuasive language has been described as the language of power. When a person can use persuasive language effectively in speech and writing, it increases their ability to participate and access power in democratic societies. Persuasive writing is one of three key text types in the Australian Curriculum: English, and language features of persuasive text types are taught across the curriculum

(2020). Three Generations, Two Countries of Origin, One Speech Community: Australian-Macedonians and their Language(s) Australian Journal of Linguistics: Vol. 40, No. 3, pp. 387-388.

(2020). Bilingualism in the Community: Code-switching and Grammars in Contact. Australian Journal of Linguistics: Vol. 40, No. 2, pp. 263-265.

ABSTRACT Traditional studies of evaluation in Systemic Functional Linguistics have presented a wide range of characteristics and resources of implicit and explicit evaluation (henceforth IE and EE). These studies have revealed that IE is tactical and involves complicated expressions but they have not clearly illustrated why speakers/writers choose one linguistic expression of IE instead of another

ABSTRACT This study investigates the acquisition of the argument structure of dative verbs in L3 English. The learners are L1 Moroccan Arabic–L2 French adults advanced in L3 English. The study considers whether the L3 learners in a formal foreign language instruction context can develop nativelike sensitivity to the semantic and morphological constraints on the distribution of double objects and prepositional

ABSTRACT This paper proposes new analyses of the semantics and morphosyntactic structure of Associated Motion [AM] constructions in Kaytetye. AM constructions have been analysed as word-level constructions, with a significant non-compositional component in the semantics. We propose that these constructions are syntactic phrasal constructions with generally compositional semantics which associate a

ABSTRACT The present study is an attempt at a comprehensive presentation of various functions in the reference system of Mandarin Chinese. The study demonstrates that the reference system of Mandarin consists of a finite number of functions, some of which have not been identified as such, namely: absence of instructions to identify the referent, marked by bare nouns (sometimes analyzed as ‘indetermined’);

ABSTRACT By disabling two traditional constraints on general-language one-verb sub-events, Goldberg shows that: (i) a verb can specify both manner and result or change of location; and (ii) the profiled event of one verb need not be causally related to the evoked background frame event. This study develops Goldberg's claims further to show that a single verb can meet (i) and (ii) at the same time.

ABSTRACT This paper examines how ethnic Chinese Indonesian college students from West Kalimantan classified others’ ethnic identity by drawing on perceptions of language and phenotype. Several studies have demonstrated the undeniable effect of phenotype on an individual’s perception of their own and others’ ethnic identit(ies). Additionally, numerous studies have highlighted the role of language in

In Analyzing Meaning Paul Kroeger creates an interconnection between semantics and pragmatics as two evolving, capacious areas of linguistic inquiry. He explores a wide range of topics, including l...

Pre-stopping is a widespread and usually non-contrastive phenomenon in Australian languages. Contrastive pre-stopping is rare and materials on it are limited. Based partly on original phonetic data, this paper provides evidence that Arabana, a language of northern South Australia, has contrastive pre-stopping of both laterals and nasals. Current analyses of pre-stopping, both contrastive and non-contrastive

The paper is devoted to an analysis of English media discourse in terms of marking epistemic responsibility (ER). The study suggests 10 types of syntactic and lexical means used to mark a speaker’s responsibility for the proposition reliability. They are classified according to: (i) ER domain: high, low, disclaiming ER; (ii) level of the language system: syntactic or lexical; and (iii) lexico-grammatical

This study analyzes the language ideologies of young people from two geographically and socially distinct regions of Sydney: Western Sydney and the Northern Beaches. It takes a qualitative approach to examine these speakers’ indexical orientations towards two variable linguistic features that occur in Australian English (like and youse). Although they have different histories in Australian English

The study examines the Overt Pronoun Constraint (OPC) in Turkish by collecting data from native speakers of this language through a test which targets the binding relationship between embedded and matrix subjects. The findings show that context plays a crucial role in determining the co-indexation relationship in such structures. Depending on the context, there exists an asymmetry which is in line

This article discusses the distribution and function of a suffix that has been labelled ‘ergative’ in the literature on Dalabon, a Gunwinyguan (non-Pama-Nyungan) language of south-western Arnhem Land. Our first-hand data reveal that although this marker (-yih) more frequently occurs on A arguments of multivalent clauses, it also appears with significant frequency on S arguments of monovalent clauses

Police are (generally) required to inform a suspect of their right to remain silent before questioning that suspect about a potential crime. This is a key protection for suspects which is implemented through a policy about language. Unfortunately, there is evidence that many Aboriginal suspects in the Northern Territory often fail to understand their right to silence. A key reason for this is the way

Mandarin is one of the most representative tonal languages in the world with four tone categories (Tone 1 (T1): high level (ā); Tone 2 (T2): high rising (á); Tone 3 (T3): dipping (ǎ); Tone 4 (T4): high falling (à)). Learning Mandarin tones is known to be difficult for speakers from diverse linguistic backgrounds. The perception of Mandarin tones by naïve, non-native listeners from two tonal languages

and Travis thus systematically and elegantly show that rather than structural convergence, the main contribution of code-switching is in contextual (re)distribution. This study represents a significant milestone in the study of contact-induced change. Methodologically, its use of a purpose-built corpus realizes the promise of modern data collection technologies, and its detailed discussion of the processes

Recent decades have witnessed a growing interest in translation quality assessment (TQA), which is dedicated to the formulation of an objective and comprehensive model for translation evaluation. However, most attempts focus on theoretical explanations, while ignoring concrete instructions and operationalizations. Although House was not the first person to initiate a TQA model, her model is ‘still

(2020). The Politics of English Second Language Writing Assessment in Global Contexts. Australian Journal of Linguistics: Vol. 40, No. 1, pp. 133-135.

Borrowing is said to be a pervasive phenomenon among Australian languages, particularly in the domains of flora–fauna and material culture. In-depth studies of borrowing in individual languages or small groups of languages exist, as do quantitative analyses covering selected vocabulary items across a large number of languages. To date, however, there have not been any comprehensive surveys of the flora–fauna

In this article, the switch-reference system of Ngarla (Ngayarta, Pama-Nyungan) is described in detail. Switch-reference is shown exclusively to occur in non-restrictive relative clauses. There are three sets of suffixes marking switch-reference, tense being distinguished with same subject marking. The so-called ‘naturalness assumption’ regarding the association between SS/DS marking and simultaneous/sequential

The intensifiers this/that can be traced back to the fourteenth century, when these deictic demonstratives acquired an adverbial status as a result of a grammaticalization process by means of which they became degree adverbs with the meaning of ‘to this/that extent, so much, so’ (OED s.v. this/that adv.). The present paper contributes to the study of the development of intensifiers through the grammaticalization