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Meakins, F., & Pensalfini, R. (forthcoming). Holding the mirror up to converted languages: Two grammars, one lexicon. International Journal of Bilingualism.
2020. Holding the mirror up to converted languages: Two grammars, one lexicon2020 •
This article describes an unusual result of language contact occurring in North-Central Australia, and suggests that it may represent a hitherto unreported type of language hybridisation scenario, which we dub 'lexical convergence'. Extensive long-term contact between speakers of the genetically unrelated Jingulu and Mudburra has resulted in a high degree of lexical borrowing, with little if any change to syntactic or morphological structure in either language. What is particularly unusual about this borrowing is that it is bidirectional, with almost equal numbers of words being borrowed from Jingulu into Mudburra as vice versa. This situation mirrors that of converted languages, where two varieties have come to share a grammar through contact, but retain separate lexicons. We claim that this unusual situation is the result of long-term cohabitation of the two groups, a shared cultural life, and relative socio-political equality between the two groups. We venture that these may be requisite to the sort of extensive bidirectional borrowing and maintenance of individual grammatical systems found in lexical convergence more generally.
2018 •
This is a grouped bibliography of literature on complex verb constructions (serial verbs, coverbs, complex predicates, etc.). Please feel free to use it, comment on it, or send me feedback of anything I might have missed. If you make extensive use of my list for academic publication, I would appreciate an acknowledgement.
Language Sciences 34: 147-170.
The reality status of directives and its coding across languages2012 •
TRANSACTIONS OF THE PHILOLOGICAL SOCIETY 118 (3): 401-446
Routes towards the irrealisIrrealis markers are characterized by the rampant heterogeneity of their distributional patterns and by the tendency to appear as portmanteau morphemes encoding other grammatical categories (e.g. person). These and other characteristics may find an explanation in diachronic terms, by taking into account the sources from which irrealis markers derive. In this article, the most frequent sources of irrealis markers are identified by means of a diachronic-typological survey based on a 100-language sample: these include lexical verbs such as ‘go’, ‘want’ or ‘be’, former subordinate clauses that come to be used as main clauses through insubordination and deictic expressions that refer to distant elements. Considering the diachrony of irrealis markers allows us to explain some of their properties such as, among others, (i) their distribution across the domain of non-actualized situation types, (ii) the primacy of certain non-actualized situation types that happen to work as bridgeheads in the diachronic development from the source to the target irrealis marker, (iii) the frequent co-encoding of person and reality status by means of the same markers, and (iv) the existence of ergativity splits involving irrealis clauses. The diachronic-typological survey conducted in this article has some implications on the debate on the validity of reality status as a grammatical category with two opposite values of realis and irrealis: it will be argued that the diachronic scenarios leading to the emergence of irrealis markers are not substantially different from those known from the literature on the emergence of modal markers, which makes reality status superfluous as an independent grammatical category.
Language and Linguistics Compass
Rebuilding Australia's Linguistic Profile: Recent Developments in Research on Australian Aboriginal Languages2008 •
The more than 250 languages spoken in Australia prior to the nineteenth century exhibit both striking similarities to one another and remarkable variation. The exponential increase in what linguists have learned about these languages since the 1960s has been sadly in inverse proportion to the number of people learning them as a mother tongue. This article will review some of the most exciting recent developments in Australianist linguistic research, while also acknowledging the context of language loss and disenfranchisement within which they are situated. The message it offers is ultimately optimistic, however. For the languages still spoken regularly, research into the previously neglected components of the multimodal communicative system that is language in use is adding new depth to the existing documentation. For the majority of Australia's indigenous languages – where economic, social and political pressures have taken their toll – a different set of concerns has emerged. Linguists are now grappling with a range of theoretical and empirical questions regarding the mechanisms of language contact and attrition, even as they continue to contribute new insights into the traditional ‘core’ fields of phonetics and phonology, morphosyntax, semantics and historical linguistics. Moreover, an increasing consciousness of the respective roles of outsider researcher and speech community is changing not only the methodologies of linguists ‘in the field’, but also the research itself. All of these factors will shape the directions of future Australianist linguistic research, as well as the number and nature of languages that remain to be studied.
Journal of Language Contact
2019. Gender lender: Noun borrowings between Jingulu and Mudburra in northern Australia2019 •
This paper explores borrowing of nouns between two unrelated Australian languages with a long history of contact: Mudburra, a language with no grammatical gender, and Jingulu, which has four genders and super-classing. Unusually, this case involves extensive borrowing in both directions, resulting in the languages sharing 65% of their nouns. This bi-directional borrowing of nouns allows us to simultaneously examine the behaviour of gender where (i) nouns from a language with no gender have transferred into a language with a gender system, and (ii) nouns from a language with gender have transferred into a language with no gender system. Previous work in this area has been interested in the how nouns are categorised in scenario (i)). We show that Mudburra nouns borrowed into Jingulu are assigned gender on the basis of their semantics, with gender superclassing effects and morpho-phonological massaging. Some of the borrowings into Mudburra, on the other hand, demonstrate a sophisticated understanding of Jingulu morpho-syntax which speaks to a high degree of bilingualism between Mudburra and Jingulu over an extended period.
In Harold Koch & Rachel Nordlinger (eds.), The Languages and Linguistics of Australia: A comprehensive guide. Berlin: Mouton. pp. 365-416
2014. Language contact varieties.with Carmel O'Shannessy. Journal of Language Contact 5.2: 216-46.
2012. Typological constraints on verb integration in two Australian mixed languagesJournal of Pragmatics 43 (2011), pp. 3489-3521
How directive constructions emerge: Grammaticalization, cooptation, constructionalizationwith Carmel O'Shannessy. Lingua 120.7: 1693-713
2010. Ordering arguments about: Word order and discourse motivations in the development and use of the ergative marker in two Australian mixed languagesAustralian Journal of Linguistics
Distinguishing animacy effects for Agents: A case study of Australian languages2010 •
Natural Language & Linguistic Theory
Towards a Typology of Configurationality2004 •
In Rob Pensalfini, Diana Guilleman & Myfany Turpin (eds.), Language Description Informed by Theory. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. pp. 283–315.
2014. Nominals as adjuncts or arguments: Further evidence from language mixing.2010 •
with Patrick McConvell. Australian Journal of Linguistics 25.1: 9-30.
2005. Gurindji Kriol: A Mixed Language Emerges from CodeswitchingLinguistic Variation Yearbook
Part of speech mismatches in modular grammar: New evidence from Jingulu2001 •
with Gillian Wigglesworth. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 34.2: 171-88.
2013. How much input is enough? Correlating comprehension and child language input in an endangered languageScando-Slavica 63/2
'Idiosyncratic (Dis)agreement Patterns: The Structure and Diachrony of Russian Paucal Subjects' (with Iván Igartua) - Scando-Slavica (2017)2017 •
Principles of syntactic reconstruction
Syntactic change and syntactic borrowing in generative grammar2008 •
Journal of Language Contact
Typological constraints on verb integration in two Australian mixed languages 1 , 22012 •
The Handbook of Language Contact
Language Contact and Australian Languages2020 •
Raoul Zamponi