This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the cc by 4.0 license. Language Dyn... more This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the cc by 4.0 license. Language Dynamics and Change (2023) 1-45 brill.com/ldc Dialect differences and linguistic divergence A crosslinguistic survey of grammatical variation
One of the central goals of human language is to convey intended messages successfully to the add... more One of the central goals of human language is to convey intended messages successfully to the addressee. However, communication inherently involves uncertainty or unexpectedness which hinders this delivery. Different languages have different strategies to manage unexpectedness. In this article, we explore the strategies used in Murrinhpatha, an Australian Aboriginal language with highly flexible syntax, that is, free constituent order and frequent NP omission. We argue that Murrinhpatha speakers utilise the language's syntactic flexibility to manage referential expectations. Highly unexpected referents tend to be expressed preverbally, while expected referents which need to be 'reinforced' are usually expressed postverbally. Uniquely expected referents are usually syntactically omitted. We argue that expectation and uncertainty provide a more convincing account of Murrinhpatha compared to an account of accessibility. Our findings shed new light on several aspects of syntactically flexible languages, including pragmatic salience and newsworthiness, and the functional distinction between postverbal NPs and NP omission.
Agreement markers that refer to the same feature or argument tend to be found in the same positio... more Agreement markers that refer to the same feature or argument tend to be found in the same position (e.g., all subject agreement markers as suffixes, all object agreement markers as prefixes). However, little is known about the exceptions to this trend: cases where different values of the same feature are marked in different positions in the word (i.e., positional splits). In this study, we explore the positional properties of subject and object person-number agreement markers in a phylogenetically diverse sample of 227 languages. We find that the recurrence of a positional split is proportional to its degree of naturalness, that is, to the amount of shared feature values amongst the forms with the same positional arrangement. Natural patterns (e.g., where prefixal forms all share SG and suffixal forms all share PL) are over-represented in natural languages compared to a random baseline. The most unnatural patterns are underrepresented, and splits with an intermediate level of unnatu...
Inflectional affixes expressing the same grammatical category (e.g., subject agreement) tend to a... more Inflectional affixes expressing the same grammatical category (e.g., subject agreement) tend to appear in the same morphological position in the word. We hypothesize that this cross-linguistic tendency toward category clustering is at least partly the result of a learning bias, which facilitates the transmission of morphology from one generation to the next if each inflectional category has a consistent morphological position. We test this in an online artificial language experiment, teaching adult English speakers a miniature language consisting of noun stems representing shapes and suffixes representing the color and number features of each shape. In one experimental condition, each suffix category has a fixed position, with color in the first position and number in the second position. In a second condition, each specific combination of suffixes has a fixed order, but some combinations have color in the first position, and some have number in the first position. In a third condition, suffixes are randomly ordered on each presentation. While the language in the first condition is consistent with the category clustering principle, those in the other conditions are not. Our results indicate that category clustering of inflectional affixes facilitates morphological learning, at least in adult English speakers. Moreover, we found that languages that violate category clustering but still follow fixed affix ordering patterns are more learnable than languages with random ordering. Altogether, our results provide evidence for individual biases toward category clustering; we suggest that this bias may play a causal role in shaping the typological regularities in affix order we find in natural language.
ABSTRACT Marri Tjevin is the language of the Rak Thangkurral and Rak Nadirri people of the Daly R... more 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 freely in stricture and voicing, which constitutes a typologically unusual form of obstruent manner neutralization. Additionally there are two contrastive voiced stops /b, d/, which occur both medially and initially. In this paper we present the first detailed analysis of Marri Tjevin’s system of obstruent contrasts and positional neutralization, as well as reporting an interesting association between phonemic stops and prosodic prominence. We argue that the Marri Tjevin stop/fricative contrast shows distributional and phonetic commonalities with fortis/lenis obstruent contrasts in some other Australian languages, while the association of phonemic stops with prosodic prominence also echoes patterns observed elsewhere in Australia. Thus, while Marri Tjevin’s system of fricative contrast and neutralization is typologically unusual, it shows striking parallels with other Australian phonologies.
Recent research has revealed several languages (e.g. Chintang, Raráramuri, Tagalog, Murrinhpatha... more Recent research has revealed several languages (e.g. Chintang, Raráramuri, Tagalog, Murrinhpatha) that challenge the general expectation of strict sequential ordering in morphological structure. However, it has remained unclear whether these languages exhibit random placement of affixes or whether there are some underlying probabilistic principles that predict their placement. Here we address this question for verbal agreement markers and hypothesize a probabilistic universal of CATEGORY CLUSTERING, with two effects: (i) markers in paradigmatic opposition tend to be placed in the same morphological position (‘paradigmatic alignment’; Crysmann & Bonami 2016); (ii) morphological positions tend to be categorically uniform (‘featural coherence’; Stump 2001). We first show in a corpus study that category clustering drives the distribution of agreement prefixes in speakers’ production of Chintang, a language where prefix placement is not constrained by any categorical rules of sequential...
Clause chaining is a form of syntactic dependency holding between a series of clauses, typically ... more Clause chaining is a form of syntactic dependency holding between a series of clauses, typically expressing temporal or causal relations between events. Prosodic hierarchy theory proposes that syntactic constituents are systematically mapped to prosodic constituents, but most versions of the theory do not account for clause chain syntax. This article presents original data from Matukar Panau, a clause-chaining Oceanic (Austronesian) language of Papua New Guinea. The clause chain is a syntactic constituent in which final-clause TAM scopes over preceding clauses. There are also other types of multi-clausal structures, encompassing subordinate adverbial clauses, and verbless copula clauses, and we analyse all these as instances of the “syntactic sentence.” The syntactic sentence maps to a distinct prosodic domain, marked by the scaling of L% boundary tones, and we equate this domain with the “utterance phrase” posited in some versions of prosodic hierarchy theory. The prosodic characte...
Principles of morphotactics are a major source of morphological diversity amongst the world’s lan... more Principles of morphotactics are a major source of morphological diversity amongst the world’s languages, and it is well-known that languages exhibit many different types of deviation from a canonical ideal in which there is a unique and consistent mapping between function and form. In this paper we present data from Murrinhpatha (non-Pama-Nyungan, northern Australia) that demonstrates a type of non-canonical morphotactics so far unattested in the literature, one which we call positional dependency. This type is unusual in that the non-canonical pattern is driven by morphological form rather than by morphosyntactic function. In this case the realisation of one morph is dependent on the position in the verbal template of another morph. Thus, it is the linearisation of morphs that conditions the morphological realisation, not the morphosyntactic feature set. Positional dependency in Murrinhpatha thus expands our typology of content-form interactions and non-canonical morphotactics with...
Clause chaining is a form of syntactic dependency holding between a series of clauses, typically ... more Clause chaining is a form of syntactic dependency holding between a series of clauses, typically expressing temporal or causal relations between events. Prosodic hierarchy theory proposes that syntactic constituents are systematically mapped to prosodic constituents, but most versions of the theory do not account for clause chain syntax. This article presents original data from Matukar Panau, a clause-chaining Oceanic (Austronesian) language of Papua New Guinea. The clause chain is a syntactic constituent in which final-clause TAM scopes over preceding clauses. There are also other types of multi-clausal structures, encompassing subordinate adverbial clauses, and verbless copula clauses, and we analyse all these as instances of the "syntactic sentence." The syntactic sentence maps to a distinct prosodic domain, marked by the scaling of L% boundary tones, and we equate this domain with the "utterance phrase" posited in some versions of prosodic hierarchy theory. The prosodic characteristics of the Matukar Panau utterance phrase are similar to those found in non-chaining languages, but while other languages use this prosody to mark pragmatically related groups of clauses, in Matukar Panau it most commonly maps to a syntactic sentence.
A long-standing problem in linguistics is how to define 'word'. Recent research has focused on th... more A long-standing problem in linguistics is how to define 'word'. Recent research has focused on the incompatibility of diverse definitions, and the challenge of finding a definition that is cross-linguistically applicable (e.g. Haspelmath 2011; Gijn and Zúñiga 2014; Bickel and Zúñiga 2017; Tallman 2020). In this study I take a different approach, asking whether one structure is more word-like than another based on Shannon's (1948) concepts of predictability and information. I hypothesise that word constructions tend to be more 'internally predictable' than phrase constructions, where internal predictability is the degree to which the entropy of one constructional element is reduced by mutual information with another element. I illustrate the method with case studies of complex verbs in German and Murrinhpatha, comparing verbs with selectionally restricted elements against those built from free elements. I propose that this method identifies an important mathematical property of many word-like structures, though I do not expect that it will solve all the problems of wordhood.
Word prominence in morphologically complex languages
This chapter describes the prosodic structure of verbs in three polysynthetic languages of northe... more This chapter describes the prosodic structure of verbs in three polysynthetic languages of northern Australia: Bininj Gun-wok, Murrinhpatha and Ngalakgan. Verbs in these languages have mixed grammatical word/phrase characteristics, and prosodic constituency reflects these grammatical properties in interesting ways. In all three languages, phrasal accents are anchored to the edges of prosodic words, and provide the only clear form of prosodic prominence. I take a parsimonious approach to prosodic constituency, preferring the smallest possible number of constituent levels, and assuming no particular constituent level (e.g. metrical feet) to be universal. This results in a relatively sparse prosodic hierarchy for Australian polysynthetic languages, in contrast to the multiple verb-internal levels proposed for some other polysynthetic languages (e.g. Schiering et al. 2010; Uchihara 2018).
Sociolinguistic variation involves socially constituted categories, and is therefore shaped by th... more Sociolinguistic variation involves socially constituted categories, and is therefore shaped by the salient categories of a particular social context (e.g. Eckert 1989; Stanford & Preston 2009). Australian Indigenous societies have undergone rapid social change in the last 200 years, and sociolinguistic patterns have changed in response to this. Traditional societies were built upon kin relations, ceremonial status, corporate groups such as clan and moiety, and relations to the land. Sociolinguistic variation reflected these categories (e.g. Sutton 1978; Nash 1990; Wilkinson 1991; Garde 2008). But since colonisation and town settlement there have been changes in social structure, and with it the types of sociolinguistic variation. In town, youth grow up among large groups of peers, and this gives rise to generational or subcultural identities, with associated linguistic variation (e.g. Amery 1985; Langlois 2006; O’Shannessy 2011; Mansfield 2014a). Meanwhile, variation associated with kinship, clans, moieties, territories and social status has been greatly attenuated. Traditional social categories (i.e. those established before colonisation) are still recognised in town life, though the reduction of associated linguistic indexation may reflect a loss of social salience.
Recent research has revealed several languages (e.g. Chintang, Raráramuri, Tagalog, Murrinhpatha)... more Recent research has revealed several languages (e.g. Chintang, Raráramuri, Tagalog, Murrinhpatha) that challenge the general expectation of strict sequential ordering in morphological structure. However, it has remained unclear whether these languages exhibit random placement of affixes or whether there are some underlying probabilistic principles that predict their placement. Here we address this question for verbal agreement markers and hypothesize a probabilistic universal of CATEGORY CLUSTERING, with two effects: (i) markers in paradigmatic opposition tend to be placed in the same morphological position ('paradigmatic alignment'; Crysmann & Bonami 2016); (ii) morphological positions tend to be categorically uniform ('featural coherence'; Stump 2001). We first show in a corpus study that category clustering drives the distribution of agreement prefixes in speakers' production of Chintang, a language where prefix placement is not constrained by any categorical rules of sequential ordering. We then show in a typological study that the same principle also shapes the evolution of morphological structure: although exceptions are attested, paradigms are much more likely to obey rather than to violate the principle. Category clustering is therefore a good candidate for a universal force shaping the structure and use of language, potentially due to benefits in processing and learning.
Murrinhpatha, an Aboriginal language of northern Australia, has an initial k-alternation in verbs... more Murrinhpatha, an Aboriginal language of northern Australia, has an initial k-alternation in verbs that has hitherto been resistant to grammatical analysis. I argue that k-does not encode any feature of event structure, but rather signals the speaker's epistemic primacy over the addressee. This authority may relate to concrete perceptual factors in the field of discourse, or to socially normative authority, where it asserts the speaker's epistemic rights. These rights are most salient in the domains of kin, country and totems, as opposed to other topics in which speakers are habitually circumspect and co-construct knowledge. My analysis of the k-alternation thus brings together the typology of epistemic grammar (Evans, Bergqvist, & San Roque, 2018a, 2018b), and a sociolinguistic perspective on stance (Jaffe, 2009).
Inflectional allomorphy is a prototypical form of morphological complexity, introducing unpredict... more Inflectional allomorphy is a prototypical form of morphological complexity, introducing unpredictability into the mapping of form to meaning. In this chapter we examine a system of verb inflection allomorphy in the Murrinhpatha language of northern Australia, which shows a high level of complexity as measured by unpredictability of analogical relations in inflectional exponence. We argue that in this case the unpredictability is associated with incremental demorphologisation, the process whereby morphology gradually dissolves into unanalysable lexical form. We present observations of analogical change in Murrinhpatha, comparing contemporary fieldwork documentation with data from 40 years' earlier, showing that a long-term process of demorphologisation is still underway in recent generations, resulting in increasing complexity of the system.
Documenting sociolinguistic variation in lesser-studied languages presents meth-odological challe... more Documenting sociolinguistic variation in lesser-studied languages presents meth-odological challenges, but also offers important research opportunities. In this paper we examine three key methodological challenges commonly faced by researchers who are outsiders to the community. We then present practical solutions for successful variationist research on indigenous languages and meaningful partnerships with local communities. In particular, we draw insights from our research with Australian languages and indigenous languages of rural China. We also highlight reasons why such lesser-studied languages are crucial to the further advancement of sociolinguistic theory, arguing that the value of the research justifies the effort needed to overcome the methodological difficulty. We find that the challenges of sociolinguistics in these communities sometimes make standard varia-tionist methods untenable, but the methodological solutions we propose can lead to valuable results and community relationships.
Lexical compounding generally works by adjoining a second lexeme either directly to the stem of t... more Lexical compounding generally works by adjoining a second lexeme either directly to the stem of the first lexeme (as in [sabre-[tooth]]-s), or to the whole inflected form of the first lexeme (as in [milk-[teeth]]). Murrinhpatha presents a third distinct type, where the adjoined lexeme is attached to a prosodic edge, which may occur either before or after various inflectional affixes, rather than attaching to a fixed morphosyntactic host. " Prosodic compounding " of this type has not been previously attested in natural language. However, I argue that in Stratal Phonology (Bermúdez-Otero, 2016), where prosodic constituents are formed and reformed on distinct morphological strata, we may formulate a motivated account in which prosodic compounding fills a typological gap. This account of Murrinhpatha verb morphology offers a structurally motivated alternative to previous accounts that posit a purely stipulative morphotactic template.
The traditional Murrinhpatha conception of personhood is similar to what has been observed in oth... more The traditional Murrinhpatha conception of personhood is similar to what has been observed in other Australian Aboriginal societies, conceiving of the self as a node in a relational network of kinship. But since town settlement, traditional social roles have been radically reconfigured, with a series of economic and ideological factors conspiring to deprecate the role of young men. Murrinhpatha youth respond by embracing a rebellious sub-cultural identity, drawing on mass-media sources to re-imagine themselves as other types of persons. The Murrinhpatha language makes this re-imagining of personhood unusually explicit, since it uses separate grammatical categories to encode socially recognised “persons” versus other animate beings.
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the cc by 4.0 license. Language Dyn... more This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the cc by 4.0 license. Language Dynamics and Change (2023) 1-45 brill.com/ldc Dialect differences and linguistic divergence A crosslinguistic survey of grammatical variation
One of the central goals of human language is to convey intended messages successfully to the add... more One of the central goals of human language is to convey intended messages successfully to the addressee. However, communication inherently involves uncertainty or unexpectedness which hinders this delivery. Different languages have different strategies to manage unexpectedness. In this article, we explore the strategies used in Murrinhpatha, an Australian Aboriginal language with highly flexible syntax, that is, free constituent order and frequent NP omission. We argue that Murrinhpatha speakers utilise the language's syntactic flexibility to manage referential expectations. Highly unexpected referents tend to be expressed preverbally, while expected referents which need to be 'reinforced' are usually expressed postverbally. Uniquely expected referents are usually syntactically omitted. We argue that expectation and uncertainty provide a more convincing account of Murrinhpatha compared to an account of accessibility. Our findings shed new light on several aspects of syntactically flexible languages, including pragmatic salience and newsworthiness, and the functional distinction between postverbal NPs and NP omission.
Agreement markers that refer to the same feature or argument tend to be found in the same positio... more Agreement markers that refer to the same feature or argument tend to be found in the same position (e.g., all subject agreement markers as suffixes, all object agreement markers as prefixes). However, little is known about the exceptions to this trend: cases where different values of the same feature are marked in different positions in the word (i.e., positional splits). In this study, we explore the positional properties of subject and object person-number agreement markers in a phylogenetically diverse sample of 227 languages. We find that the recurrence of a positional split is proportional to its degree of naturalness, that is, to the amount of shared feature values amongst the forms with the same positional arrangement. Natural patterns (e.g., where prefixal forms all share SG and suffixal forms all share PL) are over-represented in natural languages compared to a random baseline. The most unnatural patterns are underrepresented, and splits with an intermediate level of unnatu...
Inflectional affixes expressing the same grammatical category (e.g., subject agreement) tend to a... more Inflectional affixes expressing the same grammatical category (e.g., subject agreement) tend to appear in the same morphological position in the word. We hypothesize that this cross-linguistic tendency toward category clustering is at least partly the result of a learning bias, which facilitates the transmission of morphology from one generation to the next if each inflectional category has a consistent morphological position. We test this in an online artificial language experiment, teaching adult English speakers a miniature language consisting of noun stems representing shapes and suffixes representing the color and number features of each shape. In one experimental condition, each suffix category has a fixed position, with color in the first position and number in the second position. In a second condition, each specific combination of suffixes has a fixed order, but some combinations have color in the first position, and some have number in the first position. In a third condition, suffixes are randomly ordered on each presentation. While the language in the first condition is consistent with the category clustering principle, those in the other conditions are not. Our results indicate that category clustering of inflectional affixes facilitates morphological learning, at least in adult English speakers. Moreover, we found that languages that violate category clustering but still follow fixed affix ordering patterns are more learnable than languages with random ordering. Altogether, our results provide evidence for individual biases toward category clustering; we suggest that this bias may play a causal role in shaping the typological regularities in affix order we find in natural language.
ABSTRACT Marri Tjevin is the language of the Rak Thangkurral and Rak Nadirri people of the Daly R... more 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 freely in stricture and voicing, which constitutes a typologically unusual form of obstruent manner neutralization. Additionally there are two contrastive voiced stops /b, d/, which occur both medially and initially. In this paper we present the first detailed analysis of Marri Tjevin’s system of obstruent contrasts and positional neutralization, as well as reporting an interesting association between phonemic stops and prosodic prominence. We argue that the Marri Tjevin stop/fricative contrast shows distributional and phonetic commonalities with fortis/lenis obstruent contrasts in some other Australian languages, while the association of phonemic stops with prosodic prominence also echoes patterns observed elsewhere in Australia. Thus, while Marri Tjevin’s system of fricative contrast and neutralization is typologically unusual, it shows striking parallels with other Australian phonologies.
Recent research has revealed several languages (e.g. Chintang, Raráramuri, Tagalog, Murrinhpatha... more Recent research has revealed several languages (e.g. Chintang, Raráramuri, Tagalog, Murrinhpatha) that challenge the general expectation of strict sequential ordering in morphological structure. However, it has remained unclear whether these languages exhibit random placement of affixes or whether there are some underlying probabilistic principles that predict their placement. Here we address this question for verbal agreement markers and hypothesize a probabilistic universal of CATEGORY CLUSTERING, with two effects: (i) markers in paradigmatic opposition tend to be placed in the same morphological position (‘paradigmatic alignment’; Crysmann & Bonami 2016); (ii) morphological positions tend to be categorically uniform (‘featural coherence’; Stump 2001). We first show in a corpus study that category clustering drives the distribution of agreement prefixes in speakers’ production of Chintang, a language where prefix placement is not constrained by any categorical rules of sequential...
Clause chaining is a form of syntactic dependency holding between a series of clauses, typically ... more Clause chaining is a form of syntactic dependency holding between a series of clauses, typically expressing temporal or causal relations between events. Prosodic hierarchy theory proposes that syntactic constituents are systematically mapped to prosodic constituents, but most versions of the theory do not account for clause chain syntax. This article presents original data from Matukar Panau, a clause-chaining Oceanic (Austronesian) language of Papua New Guinea. The clause chain is a syntactic constituent in which final-clause TAM scopes over preceding clauses. There are also other types of multi-clausal structures, encompassing subordinate adverbial clauses, and verbless copula clauses, and we analyse all these as instances of the “syntactic sentence.” The syntactic sentence maps to a distinct prosodic domain, marked by the scaling of L% boundary tones, and we equate this domain with the “utterance phrase” posited in some versions of prosodic hierarchy theory. The prosodic characte...
Principles of morphotactics are a major source of morphological diversity amongst the world’s lan... more Principles of morphotactics are a major source of morphological diversity amongst the world’s languages, and it is well-known that languages exhibit many different types of deviation from a canonical ideal in which there is a unique and consistent mapping between function and form. In this paper we present data from Murrinhpatha (non-Pama-Nyungan, northern Australia) that demonstrates a type of non-canonical morphotactics so far unattested in the literature, one which we call positional dependency. This type is unusual in that the non-canonical pattern is driven by morphological form rather than by morphosyntactic function. In this case the realisation of one morph is dependent on the position in the verbal template of another morph. Thus, it is the linearisation of morphs that conditions the morphological realisation, not the morphosyntactic feature set. Positional dependency in Murrinhpatha thus expands our typology of content-form interactions and non-canonical morphotactics with...
Clause chaining is a form of syntactic dependency holding between a series of clauses, typically ... more Clause chaining is a form of syntactic dependency holding between a series of clauses, typically expressing temporal or causal relations between events. Prosodic hierarchy theory proposes that syntactic constituents are systematically mapped to prosodic constituents, but most versions of the theory do not account for clause chain syntax. This article presents original data from Matukar Panau, a clause-chaining Oceanic (Austronesian) language of Papua New Guinea. The clause chain is a syntactic constituent in which final-clause TAM scopes over preceding clauses. There are also other types of multi-clausal structures, encompassing subordinate adverbial clauses, and verbless copula clauses, and we analyse all these as instances of the "syntactic sentence." The syntactic sentence maps to a distinct prosodic domain, marked by the scaling of L% boundary tones, and we equate this domain with the "utterance phrase" posited in some versions of prosodic hierarchy theory. The prosodic characteristics of the Matukar Panau utterance phrase are similar to those found in non-chaining languages, but while other languages use this prosody to mark pragmatically related groups of clauses, in Matukar Panau it most commonly maps to a syntactic sentence.
A long-standing problem in linguistics is how to define 'word'. Recent research has focused on th... more A long-standing problem in linguistics is how to define 'word'. Recent research has focused on the incompatibility of diverse definitions, and the challenge of finding a definition that is cross-linguistically applicable (e.g. Haspelmath 2011; Gijn and Zúñiga 2014; Bickel and Zúñiga 2017; Tallman 2020). In this study I take a different approach, asking whether one structure is more word-like than another based on Shannon's (1948) concepts of predictability and information. I hypothesise that word constructions tend to be more 'internally predictable' than phrase constructions, where internal predictability is the degree to which the entropy of one constructional element is reduced by mutual information with another element. I illustrate the method with case studies of complex verbs in German and Murrinhpatha, comparing verbs with selectionally restricted elements against those built from free elements. I propose that this method identifies an important mathematical property of many word-like structures, though I do not expect that it will solve all the problems of wordhood.
Word prominence in morphologically complex languages
This chapter describes the prosodic structure of verbs in three polysynthetic languages of northe... more This chapter describes the prosodic structure of verbs in three polysynthetic languages of northern Australia: Bininj Gun-wok, Murrinhpatha and Ngalakgan. Verbs in these languages have mixed grammatical word/phrase characteristics, and prosodic constituency reflects these grammatical properties in interesting ways. In all three languages, phrasal accents are anchored to the edges of prosodic words, and provide the only clear form of prosodic prominence. I take a parsimonious approach to prosodic constituency, preferring the smallest possible number of constituent levels, and assuming no particular constituent level (e.g. metrical feet) to be universal. This results in a relatively sparse prosodic hierarchy for Australian polysynthetic languages, in contrast to the multiple verb-internal levels proposed for some other polysynthetic languages (e.g. Schiering et al. 2010; Uchihara 2018).
Sociolinguistic variation involves socially constituted categories, and is therefore shaped by th... more Sociolinguistic variation involves socially constituted categories, and is therefore shaped by the salient categories of a particular social context (e.g. Eckert 1989; Stanford & Preston 2009). Australian Indigenous societies have undergone rapid social change in the last 200 years, and sociolinguistic patterns have changed in response to this. Traditional societies were built upon kin relations, ceremonial status, corporate groups such as clan and moiety, and relations to the land. Sociolinguistic variation reflected these categories (e.g. Sutton 1978; Nash 1990; Wilkinson 1991; Garde 2008). But since colonisation and town settlement there have been changes in social structure, and with it the types of sociolinguistic variation. In town, youth grow up among large groups of peers, and this gives rise to generational or subcultural identities, with associated linguistic variation (e.g. Amery 1985; Langlois 2006; O’Shannessy 2011; Mansfield 2014a). Meanwhile, variation associated with kinship, clans, moieties, territories and social status has been greatly attenuated. Traditional social categories (i.e. those established before colonisation) are still recognised in town life, though the reduction of associated linguistic indexation may reflect a loss of social salience.
Recent research has revealed several languages (e.g. Chintang, Raráramuri, Tagalog, Murrinhpatha)... more Recent research has revealed several languages (e.g. Chintang, Raráramuri, Tagalog, Murrinhpatha) that challenge the general expectation of strict sequential ordering in morphological structure. However, it has remained unclear whether these languages exhibit random placement of affixes or whether there are some underlying probabilistic principles that predict their placement. Here we address this question for verbal agreement markers and hypothesize a probabilistic universal of CATEGORY CLUSTERING, with two effects: (i) markers in paradigmatic opposition tend to be placed in the same morphological position ('paradigmatic alignment'; Crysmann & Bonami 2016); (ii) morphological positions tend to be categorically uniform ('featural coherence'; Stump 2001). We first show in a corpus study that category clustering drives the distribution of agreement prefixes in speakers' production of Chintang, a language where prefix placement is not constrained by any categorical rules of sequential ordering. We then show in a typological study that the same principle also shapes the evolution of morphological structure: although exceptions are attested, paradigms are much more likely to obey rather than to violate the principle. Category clustering is therefore a good candidate for a universal force shaping the structure and use of language, potentially due to benefits in processing and learning.
Murrinhpatha, an Aboriginal language of northern Australia, has an initial k-alternation in verbs... more Murrinhpatha, an Aboriginal language of northern Australia, has an initial k-alternation in verbs that has hitherto been resistant to grammatical analysis. I argue that k-does not encode any feature of event structure, but rather signals the speaker's epistemic primacy over the addressee. This authority may relate to concrete perceptual factors in the field of discourse, or to socially normative authority, where it asserts the speaker's epistemic rights. These rights are most salient in the domains of kin, country and totems, as opposed to other topics in which speakers are habitually circumspect and co-construct knowledge. My analysis of the k-alternation thus brings together the typology of epistemic grammar (Evans, Bergqvist, & San Roque, 2018a, 2018b), and a sociolinguistic perspective on stance (Jaffe, 2009).
Inflectional allomorphy is a prototypical form of morphological complexity, introducing unpredict... more Inflectional allomorphy is a prototypical form of morphological complexity, introducing unpredictability into the mapping of form to meaning. In this chapter we examine a system of verb inflection allomorphy in the Murrinhpatha language of northern Australia, which shows a high level of complexity as measured by unpredictability of analogical relations in inflectional exponence. We argue that in this case the unpredictability is associated with incremental demorphologisation, the process whereby morphology gradually dissolves into unanalysable lexical form. We present observations of analogical change in Murrinhpatha, comparing contemporary fieldwork documentation with data from 40 years' earlier, showing that a long-term process of demorphologisation is still underway in recent generations, resulting in increasing complexity of the system.
Documenting sociolinguistic variation in lesser-studied languages presents meth-odological challe... more Documenting sociolinguistic variation in lesser-studied languages presents meth-odological challenges, but also offers important research opportunities. In this paper we examine three key methodological challenges commonly faced by researchers who are outsiders to the community. We then present practical solutions for successful variationist research on indigenous languages and meaningful partnerships with local communities. In particular, we draw insights from our research with Australian languages and indigenous languages of rural China. We also highlight reasons why such lesser-studied languages are crucial to the further advancement of sociolinguistic theory, arguing that the value of the research justifies the effort needed to overcome the methodological difficulty. We find that the challenges of sociolinguistics in these communities sometimes make standard varia-tionist methods untenable, but the methodological solutions we propose can lead to valuable results and community relationships.
Lexical compounding generally works by adjoining a second lexeme either directly to the stem of t... more Lexical compounding generally works by adjoining a second lexeme either directly to the stem of the first lexeme (as in [sabre-[tooth]]-s), or to the whole inflected form of the first lexeme (as in [milk-[teeth]]). Murrinhpatha presents a third distinct type, where the adjoined lexeme is attached to a prosodic edge, which may occur either before or after various inflectional affixes, rather than attaching to a fixed morphosyntactic host. " Prosodic compounding " of this type has not been previously attested in natural language. However, I argue that in Stratal Phonology (Bermúdez-Otero, 2016), where prosodic constituents are formed and reformed on distinct morphological strata, we may formulate a motivated account in which prosodic compounding fills a typological gap. This account of Murrinhpatha verb morphology offers a structurally motivated alternative to previous accounts that posit a purely stipulative morphotactic template.
The traditional Murrinhpatha conception of personhood is similar to what has been observed in oth... more The traditional Murrinhpatha conception of personhood is similar to what has been observed in other Australian Aboriginal societies, conceiving of the self as a node in a relational network of kinship. But since town settlement, traditional social roles have been radically reconfigured, with a series of economic and ideological factors conspiring to deprecate the role of young men. Murrinhpatha youth respond by embracing a rebellious sub-cultural identity, drawing on mass-media sources to re-imagine themselves as other types of persons. The Murrinhpatha language makes this re-imagining of personhood unusually explicit, since it uses separate grammatical categories to encode socially recognised “persons” versus other animate beings.
Previously studied as a series of dialects: Marrithiyel, Marri Tjevin, Marri Amu and (undocumente... more Previously studied as a series of dialects: Marrithiyel, Marri Tjevin, Marri Amu and (undocumented) Marri Dan. We have now gathered enough data to confirm that, linguistically, these can be treated as one language. Brinkin has polysynthetic verb morphology, including exuberant use of incorporated body-part nominals. It is unusual among Australian languages in having a fairly extensive stop/fricative contrast. Brinkin is highly endangered, with only one fluent living speaker that we know of.
Murrinhpatha is an Australian Aboriginal language spoken in a region of tropical savannah and tid... more Murrinhpatha is an Australian Aboriginal language spoken in a region of tropical savannah and tidal inlets on the north coast of the continent. Some 3000 speakers live mostly in the towns of Wadeye and Nganmarriyanga, though they maintain close ties to their traditional lands, totems and spirit ancestors.
Murrinhpatha word structure is highly complex, and quite distinct from the better-known Pama-Nyungan languages of central and southern Australia. Murrinhpatha is characterised by prolific compounding, clitic clusters, cumulative inflection, irregular allomorphy and phonological assimilation. This book provides a comprehensive account of these phenomena, giving particular attention to questions of morphological constituency, lexical storage, and whether there is really such thing as a ‘word’ unit.
Tropical northern Australia is a region of high linguistic diversity, with dozens of language var... more Tropical northern Australia is a region of high linguistic diversity, with dozens of language varieties each spoken by a small number of people. Traditionally, this level of diversity has been supported by egalitarian linguistic ecologies, where Aboriginal people use multiple languages alongside one another in each local region. In this study, I explore new types of multilingual practices that are emerging in Darwin, the only major city in the area. Aboriginal people from the homelands often visit Darwin, and some become permanent residents, which provides the context for new types of multilingual encounters. Kriol and English are also used as a 'fall-back' languages to mitigate gaps in understanding, which allows linguistic exchange to occur between people who have only partial knowledge of each others' languages. I characterise these practices as 'linguistic exchange', used by speakers to establish their links to kin and country, while also showing respect for their interlocutor's social connections. Linguistic exchange also supports the distinctive Aboriginal mode of demand-driven resource sharing. Aboriginal language use in Darwin suggests that urban mobility is not necessarily detrimental to the future vitality of the region's rich linguistic heritage.
Uploads
Papers by John Mansfield
Brinkin has polysynthetic verb morphology, including exuberant use of incorporated body-part nominals. It is unusual among Australian languages in having a fairly extensive stop/fricative contrast.
Brinkin is highly endangered, with only one fluent living speaker that we know of.
Murrinhpatha word structure is highly complex, and quite distinct from the better-known Pama-Nyungan languages of central and southern Australia. Murrinhpatha is characterised by prolific compounding, clitic clusters, cumulative inflection, irregular allomorphy and phonological assimilation. This book provides a comprehensive account of these phenomena, giving particular attention to questions of morphological constituency, lexical storage, and whether there is really such thing as a ‘word’ unit.