We present an interdisciplinary collaboration whereby linguistic data are explored with the aim o... more We present an interdisciplinary collaboration whereby linguistic data are explored with the aim of gaining new insights on archaeological features to enrich investigations of the past. Archaeology on its own relies on a very discontinuous record and here we argue that a fuller use of linguistic resources can offer more nuanced insights of the cultural context, and thus a more comprehensive reconstruction of both archaeological histories in general and archaeological features specifically. Languages, as complex human artefacts, often develop vocabularies that reflect speakers’ need to communicate about everyday objects and actions. Therefore, it makes sense to turn to lexicographic and semantic data as sources of additional clues about various aspects of the past. To date, this kind of collaboration has either focused on aspects of culture that leave little trace in the archaeological record or on aspects of material culture that informs wider histories of migrations and contacts. Co...
We present an interdisciplinary collaboration whereby linguistic data are explored with the aim o... more We present an interdisciplinary collaboration whereby linguistic data are explored with the aim of gaining new insights on archaeological features to enrich investigations of the past. Archaeology on its own relies on a very discontinuous record and here we argue that a fuller use of linguistic resources can offer more nuanced insights of the cultural context, and thus a more comprehensive reconstruction of both archaeological histories in general and archaeological features specifically. Languages, as complex human artefacts, often develop vocabularies that reflect speakers’ need to communicate about everyday objects and actions. Therefore, it makes sense to turn to lexicographic and semantic data as sources of additional clues about various aspects of the past. To date, this kind of collaboration has either focused on aspects of culture that leave little trace in the archaeological record or on aspects of material culture that informs wider histories of migrations and contacts. Collaboration has also, more often than not, had the goal of answering linguistic rather than archaeological questions. The novel approach we propose here is a focus on a domain which does leave a substantial trace in the archaeological record and that falls in the realm of mundane aspects of the universal human experience – i.e. domestic fire use – with the aim of gaining a more nuanced and culturally grounded understanding of archaeological features and their investigation. This article is a demonstration in principle for the potential of this approach, illustrated here with a pilot study of combustion features on the Australian continent. Having collected fire-related words in a sample of dictionaries of Australian Indigenous languages, we explain how and why the information they encapsulate can support archaeological studies.
This chapter discusses the role that Australian languages can play in building an integrated hist... more This chapter discusses the role that Australian languages can play in building an integrated history of the Australian past, and the challenges that must be overcome in order to make genuine progress. We first discuss linguistics internal issues that have arisen in the course of reconstructing a picture of the linguistic past more specifically – e.g. missing information, paucity of sound change and the effects of language contact. We then go on to present a case study to illustrate some of the issues encountered in integrating interdisciplinary findings for a broader reconstruction of the past - focusing on linguistics and genetics in the context of Pama-Nyungan – and how these may best be addressed.
This chapter discusses the role that Australian languages can play in building an integrated hist... more This chapter discusses the role that Australian languages can play in building an integrated history of the Australian past, and the challenges that must be overcome in order to make genuine progress. We first discuss linguistics internal issues that have arisen in the course of reconstructing a picture of the linguistic past more specifically – e.g. missing information, paucity of sound change and the effects of language contact. We then go on to present a case study to illustrate some of the issues encountered in integrating interdisciplinary findings for a broader reconstruction of the past - focusing on linguistics and genetics in the context of Pama-Nyungan – and how these may best be addressed
Almost universally, diachronic sound patterns of languages reveal evidence of both regular and ir... more Almost universally, diachronic sound patterns of languages reveal evidence of both regular and irregular sound changes, yet an exception may be the languages of Australia. Here we discuss a long-observed and striking characteristic of diachronic sound patterns in Australian languages, namely the scarcity of evidence they present for regular sound change. Since the regularity assumption is fundamental to the comparative method, Australian languages pose an interesting challenge for linguistic theory. We examine the situation from two different angles. We identify potential explanations for the lack of evidence of regular sound change, reasoning from the nature of synchronic Australian phonologies; and we emphasise how this unusual characteristic of Australian languages may demand new methods of evaluating evidence for diachronic relatedness and new thinking about the nature of intergenerational transmission. We refer the reader also to Bowern (this volume) for additional viewpoints f...
Languages evolve, undergoing repeated small changes, some with permanent effect and some not. Cha... more Languages evolve, undergoing repeated small changes, some with permanent effect and some not. Changes affecting a language may be independent or contact-induced. Independent changes arise internally or, if externally, from non-linguistic causes. En masse, such changes cause isolated languages to drift apart in lexical form and grammatical structure. Contact-induced changes can happen when languages share speakers, or when their speakers are in contact. Frequently, languages in contact are related, having a common ancestor from which they still retain visible structure. This relatedness makes it difficult to distinguish contact-induced change from inherited similarities. In this paper, we present a simulation of contact-induced change. We show that it is possible to distinguish contact-induced change from independent change given (a) enough data, and (b) that the contact-induced change is strong enough. For a particular model, we determine how much data is enough to distinguish these...
Review(s) of: Forty Years on Ken Hale and Australian Languages by J. Simpson, D. Nash, M. Laughre... more Review(s) of: Forty Years on Ken Hale and Australian Languages by J. Simpson, D. Nash, M. Laughren, P. Austin and B. Alpher (eds), The Australian National University, Canberra (Pacific Linguistics), 2001, xvii+528pp., ISBN 085883524X.
Australianist literature has often presented morphological ‘reconstructions’ posited through the ... more Australianist literature has often presented morphological ‘reconstructions’ posited through the comparison of paradigms across sets of languages whose forms are assumed to have a shared phonetic basis. The resulting ‘protoparadigms’ have then been used to argue for the genetic relationship of the languages involved (see e.g. Dixon 1980, Blake 1988, Harvey 2003, Green 2003). This practice will be referred to in this paper as ‘inspectional’ morphological reconstruction. The use of the word ‘inspectional’ is not to be taken literally, hence the inverted commas. In doing ‘inspectional’ reconstruction practitioners do not carry out a simple inspection, but consider phonetic factors, plausible changes etc., that make their assumption of shared phonetic basis more or less plausible. Nevertheless, this is not reconstruction in the traditional sense. The Comparative Method requires that morphemes contributing to a reconstruction (grammatical or not) follow regular patterns of sound correspo...
Recent studies have highlighted divergent change as a more common outcome of language contact tha... more Recent studies have highlighted divergent change as a more common outcome of language contact than previously thought. While convergent change is often attributed to bilingual cognitive pressures, divergent change has usually been explained by appealing to sociocultural factors. We argue that the effects of social pressures on linguistic systems must nevertheless be realized in how language is processed in the individual bilingual speaker and, therefore, that divergent change is also ultimately rooted in bilingual cognition. Since lexical forms are most susceptible to contact-induced divergent change we focus on their production. We begin by developing a cognitive model that combines Grosjean’s language mode with a later output-monitoring stage. The parameters to the model are then fit to the results of an experiment in which bilinguals are seen to avoid shared lexical items. These best-fit parameters form the basis of a series of multi-agent simulations that show rapid divergence in the lexica of languages with large proportions of bilinguals. We consider the implications of these findings for the psycholinguistic study of bilingual lexical selection, the construction of phylogenies, and the reconstruction of language family histories.
ABSTRACT Languages evolve, undergoing repeated small changes, some with permanent effect and some... more ABSTRACT Languages evolve, undergoing repeated small changes, some with permanent effect and some not. Changes affecting a language may be independent or contact-induced. Independent changes arise internally or, if externally, from non-linguistic causes. En masse, such changes cause isolated languages to drift apart in lexical form and grammatical structure. Contact-induced changes can happen when languages share speakers, or when their speakers are in contact. Frequently, languages in contact are related, having a common ancestor from which they still retain visible structure. This relatedness makes it difficult to distinguish contact-induced change from inherited similarities. In this paper, we present a simulation of contact-induced change. We show that it is possible to distinguish contact-induced change from independent change given (a) enough data, and (b) that the contact-induced change is strong enough. For a particular model, we determine how much data is enough to distinguish these two cases at p < 0.05.
We present an interdisciplinary collaboration whereby linguistic data are explored with the aim o... more We present an interdisciplinary collaboration whereby linguistic data are explored with the aim of gaining new insights on archaeological features to enrich investigations of the past. Archaeology on its own relies on a very discontinuous record and here we argue that a fuller use of linguistic resources can offer more nuanced insights of the cultural context, and thus a more comprehensive reconstruction of both archaeological histories in general and archaeological features specifically. Languages, as complex human artefacts, often develop vocabularies that reflect speakers’ need to communicate about everyday objects and actions. Therefore, it makes sense to turn to lexicographic and semantic data as sources of additional clues about various aspects of the past. To date, this kind of collaboration has either focused on aspects of culture that leave little trace in the archaeological record or on aspects of material culture that informs wider histories of migrations and contacts. Co...
We present an interdisciplinary collaboration whereby linguistic data are explored with the aim o... more We present an interdisciplinary collaboration whereby linguistic data are explored with the aim of gaining new insights on archaeological features to enrich investigations of the past. Archaeology on its own relies on a very discontinuous record and here we argue that a fuller use of linguistic resources can offer more nuanced insights of the cultural context, and thus a more comprehensive reconstruction of both archaeological histories in general and archaeological features specifically. Languages, as complex human artefacts, often develop vocabularies that reflect speakers’ need to communicate about everyday objects and actions. Therefore, it makes sense to turn to lexicographic and semantic data as sources of additional clues about various aspects of the past. To date, this kind of collaboration has either focused on aspects of culture that leave little trace in the archaeological record or on aspects of material culture that informs wider histories of migrations and contacts. Collaboration has also, more often than not, had the goal of answering linguistic rather than archaeological questions. The novel approach we propose here is a focus on a domain which does leave a substantial trace in the archaeological record and that falls in the realm of mundane aspects of the universal human experience – i.e. domestic fire use – with the aim of gaining a more nuanced and culturally grounded understanding of archaeological features and their investigation. This article is a demonstration in principle for the potential of this approach, illustrated here with a pilot study of combustion features on the Australian continent. Having collected fire-related words in a sample of dictionaries of Australian Indigenous languages, we explain how and why the information they encapsulate can support archaeological studies.
This chapter discusses the role that Australian languages can play in building an integrated hist... more This chapter discusses the role that Australian languages can play in building an integrated history of the Australian past, and the challenges that must be overcome in order to make genuine progress. We first discuss linguistics internal issues that have arisen in the course of reconstructing a picture of the linguistic past more specifically – e.g. missing information, paucity of sound change and the effects of language contact. We then go on to present a case study to illustrate some of the issues encountered in integrating interdisciplinary findings for a broader reconstruction of the past - focusing on linguistics and genetics in the context of Pama-Nyungan – and how these may best be addressed.
This chapter discusses the role that Australian languages can play in building an integrated hist... more This chapter discusses the role that Australian languages can play in building an integrated history of the Australian past, and the challenges that must be overcome in order to make genuine progress. We first discuss linguistics internal issues that have arisen in the course of reconstructing a picture of the linguistic past more specifically – e.g. missing information, paucity of sound change and the effects of language contact. We then go on to present a case study to illustrate some of the issues encountered in integrating interdisciplinary findings for a broader reconstruction of the past - focusing on linguistics and genetics in the context of Pama-Nyungan – and how these may best be addressed
Almost universally, diachronic sound patterns of languages reveal evidence of both regular and ir... more Almost universally, diachronic sound patterns of languages reveal evidence of both regular and irregular sound changes, yet an exception may be the languages of Australia. Here we discuss a long-observed and striking characteristic of diachronic sound patterns in Australian languages, namely the scarcity of evidence they present for regular sound change. Since the regularity assumption is fundamental to the comparative method, Australian languages pose an interesting challenge for linguistic theory. We examine the situation from two different angles. We identify potential explanations for the lack of evidence of regular sound change, reasoning from the nature of synchronic Australian phonologies; and we emphasise how this unusual characteristic of Australian languages may demand new methods of evaluating evidence for diachronic relatedness and new thinking about the nature of intergenerational transmission. We refer the reader also to Bowern (this volume) for additional viewpoints f...
Languages evolve, undergoing repeated small changes, some with permanent effect and some not. Cha... more Languages evolve, undergoing repeated small changes, some with permanent effect and some not. Changes affecting a language may be independent or contact-induced. Independent changes arise internally or, if externally, from non-linguistic causes. En masse, such changes cause isolated languages to drift apart in lexical form and grammatical structure. Contact-induced changes can happen when languages share speakers, or when their speakers are in contact. Frequently, languages in contact are related, having a common ancestor from which they still retain visible structure. This relatedness makes it difficult to distinguish contact-induced change from inherited similarities. In this paper, we present a simulation of contact-induced change. We show that it is possible to distinguish contact-induced change from independent change given (a) enough data, and (b) that the contact-induced change is strong enough. For a particular model, we determine how much data is enough to distinguish these...
Review(s) of: Forty Years on Ken Hale and Australian Languages by J. Simpson, D. Nash, M. Laughre... more Review(s) of: Forty Years on Ken Hale and Australian Languages by J. Simpson, D. Nash, M. Laughren, P. Austin and B. Alpher (eds), The Australian National University, Canberra (Pacific Linguistics), 2001, xvii+528pp., ISBN 085883524X.
Australianist literature has often presented morphological ‘reconstructions’ posited through the ... more Australianist literature has often presented morphological ‘reconstructions’ posited through the comparison of paradigms across sets of languages whose forms are assumed to have a shared phonetic basis. The resulting ‘protoparadigms’ have then been used to argue for the genetic relationship of the languages involved (see e.g. Dixon 1980, Blake 1988, Harvey 2003, Green 2003). This practice will be referred to in this paper as ‘inspectional’ morphological reconstruction. The use of the word ‘inspectional’ is not to be taken literally, hence the inverted commas. In doing ‘inspectional’ reconstruction practitioners do not carry out a simple inspection, but consider phonetic factors, plausible changes etc., that make their assumption of shared phonetic basis more or less plausible. Nevertheless, this is not reconstruction in the traditional sense. The Comparative Method requires that morphemes contributing to a reconstruction (grammatical or not) follow regular patterns of sound correspo...
Recent studies have highlighted divergent change as a more common outcome of language contact tha... more Recent studies have highlighted divergent change as a more common outcome of language contact than previously thought. While convergent change is often attributed to bilingual cognitive pressures, divergent change has usually been explained by appealing to sociocultural factors. We argue that the effects of social pressures on linguistic systems must nevertheless be realized in how language is processed in the individual bilingual speaker and, therefore, that divergent change is also ultimately rooted in bilingual cognition. Since lexical forms are most susceptible to contact-induced divergent change we focus on their production. We begin by developing a cognitive model that combines Grosjean’s language mode with a later output-monitoring stage. The parameters to the model are then fit to the results of an experiment in which bilinguals are seen to avoid shared lexical items. These best-fit parameters form the basis of a series of multi-agent simulations that show rapid divergence in the lexica of languages with large proportions of bilinguals. We consider the implications of these findings for the psycholinguistic study of bilingual lexical selection, the construction of phylogenies, and the reconstruction of language family histories.
ABSTRACT Languages evolve, undergoing repeated small changes, some with permanent effect and some... more ABSTRACT Languages evolve, undergoing repeated small changes, some with permanent effect and some not. Changes affecting a language may be independent or contact-induced. Independent changes arise internally or, if externally, from non-linguistic causes. En masse, such changes cause isolated languages to drift apart in lexical form and grammatical structure. Contact-induced changes can happen when languages share speakers, or when their speakers are in contact. Frequently, languages in contact are related, having a common ancestor from which they still retain visible structure. This relatedness makes it difficult to distinguish contact-induced change from inherited similarities. In this paper, we present a simulation of contact-induced change. We show that it is possible to distinguish contact-induced change from independent change given (a) enough data, and (b) that the contact-induced change is strong enough. For a particular model, we determine how much data is enough to distinguish these two cases at p < 0.05.
Australian languages are often cited for the unusual degree of homogeneity in their synchronic ph... more Australian languages are often cited for the unusual degree of homogeneity in their synchronic phonologies. In contrast, the fact that their diachronic sound patterns are equally if not more atypical has received little attention. We delineate the nature of the problem posed by sound change in Australian languages, and identify promising directions for the elucidation, and explanation of this uncommon state of affairs.
THE POVERTY OF AUSTRALIAN SOUND CHANGE In the comparative method, demonstrations of cognacy play a central role. A convincing demonstration requires regular correspondences, of which a significant number involve non-identical sounds. Non-identical sounds are necessary, since correspondences that are merely identical could result not only from shared descent, but from heavy borrowing. Potential cognates in Australian languages display a degree of phonological similarity which, to our knowledge, is simply not encountered in language families in other parts of the world. Potential cognates are often near-identical, and furthermore there is little recurrence of correspondences, as the number of cognate sets is only around 200. Given its atypicality, is not surprising that current theory provides few answers as to what to do with such data. Yet while most historical linguists will never face the problem of having an overwhelming majority of their sound correspondences being near identical, in the Australian case it is an issue which demands some kind of response, and presents both a puzzle and a challenge for theories of sound change.
THE POVERTY OF AUSTRALIAN PHONOLOGICAL DIVERSITY What, then, are the tools we have to work with? Synchronically, Australian languages display uniformity in static properties of their phonological systems – phonemic inventories, phonotactic constraints, morpheme structure conditions, and metrical systems. A point worth noting however, is that these metrics ignore the question of dynamic (morphophonological) alternations. Since the synchronic morphophonological alternations in any language typically have sound change antecedents, one might hypothesize that on a continent of absent sound changes, morphophonology should likewise be impoverished. In fact though, this is not the case.
THE POVERTY OF DIVERSITY RECONSIDERED Results emerging from Round’s large survey of Australian languages’ morphophonology may provide new insight into Australian phonological diachrony and synchrony. If synchronic deletion and lenition processes reflect diachrony in at least most cases, then one effect of Australian sound changes is a tendency to preserve the typical Australian phonemic inventory and phonotactic patterns. Additionally, these new findings may shed light on the lack of observed changes in Pama-Nyungan roots. Butcher (2006) argues that post-tonic consonants in Australian languages occupy prosodically ‘strong’ positions. Assuming that these are resistant to changes such as lenition and deletion, a consequence is that the typical disyllabic Pama-Nyungan root will not contain the most common targets of sound change. Further exploration of links of this nature strike us as promising.
THE ROLE OF MULTILINGUALISM Another question worth considering is whether the paucity of sound change and apparent high rates of lexical replacement may, in part, be the result of normal transmission in a multilingual context. Results emerging from an experiment by Ellison and Miceli investigating lexical choices in code-switching bilinguals show a statistically significant bias towards the avoidance of word forms that are shared (cognates or borrowings), if alternative, distinct word forms are available in the target language. Simulations show that, diachronically, this would result in a fast depletion of cognate word forms from related languages in sustained, multilingual contact. This type of methodology, combining experimental observation with simulations, could also be extended to the study of phonological categories, potentially yielding further insights into the problem of Australian synchrony and diachrony.
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Papers by Luisa Miceli
THE POVERTY OF AUSTRALIAN SOUND CHANGE In the comparative method, demonstrations of cognacy play a central role. A convincing demonstration requires regular correspondences, of which a significant number involve non-identical sounds. Non-identical sounds are necessary, since correspondences that are merely identical could result not only from shared descent, but from heavy borrowing. Potential cognates in Australian languages display a degree of phonological similarity which, to our knowledge, is simply not encountered in language families in other parts of the world. Potential cognates are often near-identical, and furthermore there is little recurrence of correspondences, as the number of cognate sets is only around 200. Given its atypicality, is not surprising that current theory provides few answers as to what to do with such data. Yet while most historical linguists will never face the problem of having an overwhelming majority of their sound correspondences being near identical, in the Australian case it is an issue which demands some kind of response, and presents both a puzzle and a challenge for theories of sound change.
THE POVERTY OF AUSTRALIAN PHONOLOGICAL DIVERSITY What, then, are the tools we have to work with? Synchronically, Australian languages display uniformity in static properties of their phonological systems – phonemic inventories, phonotactic constraints, morpheme structure conditions, and metrical systems. A point worth noting however, is that these metrics ignore the question of dynamic (morphophonological) alternations. Since the synchronic morphophonological alternations in any language typically have sound change antecedents, one might hypothesize that on a continent of absent sound changes, morphophonology should likewise be impoverished. In fact though, this is not the case.
THE POVERTY OF DIVERSITY RECONSIDERED Results emerging from Round’s large survey of Australian languages’ morphophonology may provide new insight into Australian phonological diachrony and synchrony. If synchronic deletion and lenition processes reflect diachrony in at least most cases, then one effect of Australian sound changes is a tendency to preserve the typical Australian phonemic inventory and phonotactic patterns. Additionally, these new findings may shed light on the lack of observed changes in Pama-Nyungan roots. Butcher (2006) argues that post-tonic consonants in Australian languages occupy prosodically ‘strong’ positions. Assuming that these are resistant to changes such as lenition and deletion, a consequence is that the typical disyllabic Pama-Nyungan root will not contain the most common targets of sound change. Further exploration of links of this nature strike us as promising.
THE ROLE OF MULTILINGUALISM Another question worth considering is whether the paucity of sound change and apparent high rates of lexical replacement may, in part, be the result of normal transmission in a multilingual context. Results emerging from an experiment by Ellison and Miceli investigating lexical choices in code-switching bilinguals show a statistically significant bias towards the avoidance of word forms that are shared (cognates or borrowings), if alternative, distinct word forms are available in the target language. Simulations show that, diachronically, this would result in a fast depletion of cognate word forms from related languages in sustained, multilingual contact. This type of methodology, combining experimental observation with simulations, could also be extended to the study of phonological categories, potentially yielding further insights into the problem of Australian synchrony and diachrony.