Rachel Nordlinger

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...

The indexation of arguments with pronominal clitics is common in Pama–Nyungan languages, including the Ngumpin–Yapa languages of Northern Australia where pronominal clitics index the morphosyntactic features of subjects, objects and oblique arguments. Like incorporated pronouns, the pronominal clitics in these languages are sufficiently referential to be the only expression of a clause argument, yet clitics can also co-occur with a nominal expression of an argument, and thus redundantly co-specify properties of an argument much like more canonical instances of agreement.

The distribution of pronominal clitics in the Ngumpin languages in particular is striking from both a typological and theoretical perspective, because the bound forms that index the morphosyntactic features of predicate arguments can also index non- terms, including phrase internal dependents of a core argument, namely, possessors.

All educational testing is intended to have consequences, which are assumed to be beneficial, but tests may also have unintended, negative consequences (Messick, 1989). The issue is particularly important in the case of large-scale standardised tests, such as Australia's National Assessment Program–Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN), the intended benefits of which are increased accountability and improved educational outcomes. The NAPLAN purpose is comparable to that of other state and national 'core skills' testing programs which evaluate cross-sections of populations in order to compare results between population sub-groupings. Such comparisons underpin 'accountability' in the era of population-level testing. This study investigates the impact of NAPLAN testing on one population grouping that is prominent in the NAPLAN results comparisons and public reporting: children in remote Indigenous communities. A series of interviews with principals and teachers documents informants' first-hand experiences of the use and effects of NAPLAN in schools. In the views of most participants, the language and content of the test instruments, the nature of the test engagement and the test washback have negative impacts on students and staff, with little benefit in terms of the usefulness of the test data. The primary issue is the fact that meaningful participation in the tests depends critically on proficiency in Standard Australian English (SAE) as a first language. This study contributes to the broader discussion of how reform-targeted standardised testing for national populations affects subgroups who are not treated equitably by the test instrument or reporting for accountability purposes. It highlights a conflict between consequential validity and the notion of accountability which drives reform-targeted testing.

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.

Audiovisual materials have been produced and stored by remote Indigenous media and cultural organisations in Australia for over thirty years, representing a distributed national collection of high cultural, linguistic and national significance. However, technical obsolescence of analogue materials, harsh environmental conditions and limited access to technological and financial resources in many remote communities present serious risk of information and knowledge being lost forever.
This report outlines a collaborative project undertaken by the Melbourne Networked Society Institute and researchers from the University of Melbourne’s Australian Indigenous Studies Unit, Research Unit for Indigenous Languages and the Grimwade Centre for Cultural Materials Conservation. In partnership with the Kanamkek-Yile Ngala Museum, Wadeye, NT, and the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander Studies, the researchers investigated how culturally significant and endangered Indigenous audiovisual archives could be effectively preserved and transmitted to current and future generations using innovative digital technologies.

In this paper we describe a possessive construction in the Ngumpin-Yapa languages of Australia which has interesting implications for crosslinguistic models of agreement. In this ‘possessor dissension’ construction, the possessor NP remains a modifier within the larger possessive NP, yet both the possessor and the possessum are cross-referenced with clause-level agreement morphology. Thus, there is a type of morphosyntactic disagreement (or dissension) between the syntactic position of the possessor as an NP-internal argument, and the fact that it is cross-referenced at the clausal level as if it were a clausal argument itself. This phenomenon has had only limited mention in the typological literature, and has not previously been reported for Australian languages. In this paper we discuss the properties of the construction, how it can be distinguished from other related construction types, and its implications for the typology of agreement.

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. This edited 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.

Comparisons of prosodically defined units and grammatical structure in typologically diverse languages may reveal insights into how language is processed. This paper presents examples of intonation units comprising two or more verbs in Dalabon, a polysynthetic head-marking language from Australia. The prosody, semantics and grammar of these multi-verb intonational units is examined and it is shown that intonation is used as a delimitative device to signal the higher-level groupings of grammatical constituents in the discourse. What is interesting in these findings is that, despite the multiple grammatical constructions available to signal subordination in Dalabon, grammatical subordination is infrequently used. Instead, Dalabon speakers make use of intonation to group two or more verbs, in order to represent the close temporal relationship of events. The close examination of multi-verb intonational units presented in this paper may reveal more about the interaction between intonation and syntactic organization in a polysynthetic, head-marking language such as Dalabon.

Audiovisual materials have been produced and stored by remote Indigenous media and cultural organisations in Australia for over thirty years, representing a distributed national collection of high cultural, linguistic and national significance. However, technical obsolescence of analogue materials, harsh environmental conditions and limited access to technological and financial resources in many remote communities present serious risk of information and knowledge being lost forever. This report outlines a collaborative project undertaken by the Melbourne Networked Society Institute and researchers from the University of Melbourne’s Australian Indigenous Studies
Unit, Research Unit for Indigenous Languages and the Grimwade Centre for Cultural Materials Conservation. In partnership with the Kanamkek-Yile Ngala Museum, Wadeye, NT, and the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, the researchers investigated how culturally significant and endangered Indigenous audiovisual archives could be effectively preserved and transmitted to current and future generations using
innovative digital technologies.