Blackwood by the Beach 2006

Workshop on Australian Aboriginal Languages
March 17-19, 2006
University of Sydney,
Crommelin Field Station, Pearl Beach, NSW

About the Workshop

The fifth annual Workshop on Australian Aboriginal languages was held at the Crommelin Field Station at Pearl Beach, about 60 kms in north of Sydney, from Friday March 17th to Sunday March 19th, 2006. "Blackwood by the Beach" was hosted by the Linguistics Department at the University of Sydney and organised by Rachel Nordlinger of Melbourne University, with Jane Simpson and Michael Walsh as local organisers. An initial workshop on Contact Languages was held in the Linguistics Department (Transient Building, room 110) at Sydney University.

Some pictures are available here.

Next year a similar workshop is planned, organised by Joe Blythe , Mark Harvey and Jane Simpson .

Timetable

Friday 17 March Workshop on contact languages

University of Sydney, Transient Building, room 110, ground floor

Saturday 18 March, Pearl Beach, Crommelin Field Station

Sunday 19 March, Pearl Beach

Abstracts

The shifting langscape of northern Queensland
Denise Angelo

The use of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages has been shifting almost throughout the entire Australian continent since colonisation commenced over 200 years ago. In northern Queensland this trend is also in evidence: A traditional language may still be acquired as a first language only in some of the very remote areas of the Torres Strait and Cape York. Elsewhere, new "English-based" varieties have become the vernaculars of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples... or appear to be in the process of becoming so. Some of these varieties, such as Torres Strait Creole, Cape York Creole, Kriol and Aboriginal English, have been described to some extent for a given speech community at a given time and place. These terms have since been applied to other varieties but their application has not been systematic so that a "language label" does not necessarily provide a quick, reliable indication about the nature of the language variety thus labelled. Misunderstandings about these "language labels" have sometimes caused inappropriate distinctions between English-based varieties, such as that of language versus dialect. A more accurate picture is one of mutually comprehensible varieties within distinctive broader groupings. Generally, however, there is a lack of awareness and acknowledgement of these new language varieties, whether it be on the part of service providers - such as education, health, legal etc - or members of speech communities themselves. This has a serious effect on the accessibilty and effectiveness of service delivery.

Articles in northern languages
Brett Baker

A word class corresponding to 'article' is often missing from descriptions of Australian languages, though Marra (Heath 1981) is an exception. However, an examination of the noun class prefix systems of neighbouring Ngalakgan and Wubuy/Nunggubuyu suggests that these languages also have something like a system of articles. While these three article systems share a number properties, they are quite different in their distribution and behaviour to the articles of English. In particular, they are more closely tied to notions of 'Topic' and 'Focus' than to definiteness or specificity. Building on this proposal, we can then start to understand their functions under the scope of polarity operators (negatives, interrogatives) which would be otherwise surprising. And, with some further fine-tuning to do with number distinctions, we can also understand their distribution in 'generic' statements: references to kinds. We can thereby demonstrate that reference to entities, in these Australian languages at least, is not as underspecified as is commonly supposed.

Reduplication in Murriny Patha janba song texts in relation to
musical patterning

Linda Barwick, Allan Marett and Joe Blythe (University of Sydney)

Reduplication is widely reported as a feature of Australian song
texts. This paper will survey the deployment of reduplication in a
corpus of 64 song texts in the Murriny Patha 'janba' genre. The songs were composed from the 1960s to the 1990s by a number of different composers, including the brothers Robert Dunggoi Kolumboort, Harry Luke Palada Kolumboort and Lawrence Piyalum Kolumboort. While the majority of the texts are in everyday Murriny Patha language, a significant proportion include words in Murriny Kunybinyi, the language of the Kunybinyi ancestors who give the songs to living people in dream. This paper will explore the relationship of verbal reduplication to the musical constraints of this repertory, in particular the use of rhythmic modal patterning whereby song performances must conform to one of a limited number of rhythmic modes defined by the co-occurrence of particular vocal metres with set clapstick patterns and tempi.

Language Recovery of NSW South Coast Languages

Jutta Besold, Australian National University

With the increased interest in reclaiming cultural traditions and languages in NSW Aboriginal communities and, needless to say from a linguistic viewpoint, the languages of the New South Wales South Coast have too long been neglected. The most recent grammar was published in the mid 1970s (Eades 1976) and is in dire need of reworking within a more modern linguistic framework, and using language description from closely related and neighbouring languages as a comparative tool.

The challenges in this research lie in the interpretation of the archival material that comprises the majority of language material, and winning the respect and approval of the appropriate communities, whose collaboration is needed in order to produce a language description within a holistic framework.
I would like to use this opportunity to point out some of the challenges that present themselves to researchers of archival material and the methodology of conducting language analysis within this framework.

Reference:
Eades, Diana Kelloway. 1976. The Dharawal and Dhurga languages of the south eastern New South Wales Coast. AIAS:Canberra

From Malefactives to Number Markers in Murriny Patha

Joe Blythe, University of Sydney

Murriny Patha makes a four way number distinction: singular, dual, paucal and plural; as well as a sibling versus non-sibling
distinction for dual and paucal participants. The distinction is made through the absence or presence of dual and paucal non-sibling number marking morphemes that combine with subject and object-marking pronominals. Different combinations distinguish different groups of participants. In this presentation I wish to demonstrate that two members of a no-longer productive series of malefactive bound pronouns were reanalysed as dual number markers, thus enabling a gender distinction to be made in the duals.

Pudum na tebl kana

The expression of location in Wumpurrarni English

Samantha Disbray

A common feature of many contact varieties across northern and central Australia is the use of prepositions rather than the case marking suffixes on the noun (all or part of the noun phrase) used in Traditional languages to indicate the semantic roles of peripheral noun phrases in a clause. A case in point is the expression of location. The prepositions langa and la, and to a lesser extent na express static location and end point in Kriol varieties. However, in the contact variety Wumpurrarni English, spoken in Tennant Creek, the forms langa and la appear rarely, and na frequently.

dadan na tebl
pudum na tebl


Wumpurrarni English (WE) also differs from other contact varieties in the expression of location as it draws on Warumungu case marking morphology, the locative and allative ( - kina, -kuna, -kana).

pudum tebl kana

Double marking is often found, with the preposition derived from English/Kriol immediately preceding the locative noun phrase and the Warumungu case marker affixed to the phrase.

pudum na tebl kana
pudum na bigwan tebl kana

The use of Warumungu locative/allative in WE differs in a number of ways to its use in Warumungu. In traditional Warumungu vowel harmony between the root form and suffix is achieved through a three way allomorphy for a number of case markers, including the locative and allative, however vowel harmony is not always realized in WE. In WE case markers attach to the nominal head only, while in Warumungu all parts of the nominal head are inflected for case. Further in traditional Warumungu the suffix -kVna expresses the allative and also the locative, for objects of a transitive verb. Whether speakers adhere to this in WE is to be explored.

In this paper the expression of location in WE will be described, in relation to its three lexifier languages English, Warumungu and to other Kriol varieties. The paper draws on a large data set collected for the Aboriginal Child Language Project (ACLA). The data set includes structured and naturalistic interactions from a range of speakers of different ages, and so the variable age will be investigated to account for variation in the expression of location in WE. It is hypothesised that younger speakers are less likely to draw on the Warumungu derived means of expressing location in WE, given the exposure they have to Standard English in school, representing a possible shift to more English like structures in WE in future.

More different than we thought: reassessing the genetic status of Marrku

Nick Evans

Marrku, now close to extinct, is the language of Croker Island in the Northern Territory. Existing classifications of Australian languages have assigned Marrku to the same family as Iwaidja, Mawng and Amurdak in what is most commonly known as the Iwaidjan family (Schmidt 1919, O'Grady et al 1966, Evans 2000, Dixon 2002). In fact the level of shared cognacy between Marrku and other languages of this putative family is quite low, so that what has appeared to be the best evidence for genetic relatedness comes from what appear to be shared patterns of prefixal morphology. Though Marrku verbs in particular have highly irregular morphological paradigms, with a large number of quite distinct patterns according to the lexical item involved, some show significant paradigmatic resemblances to verbs in Iwaidja or Mawng.

Recent work on Marrku, as part of our DOBES project, has allowed us to extend the analysis of Marrku grammar, by enlisting the aid of two 'last hearers' (Joy Williams and Khaki Marrala) to transcribe and translate hitherto unanalysed recordings made in the 1960s. Though our understanding is still fragmentary, it appears increasingly likely that Marrku is less close to the other Iwaidjan languages than was previously believed. Rather, there appears to have been borrowing of entire paradigms of at least two inflected verbs from other Iwaidjan languages. (Though it is unclear whether such extreme cases of paradigm borrowing reflect code-mixing in a language death situation, or resulted from more 'normal' areal influence facilitated by the fact that most verbs had their own distinct paradigms anyway).

In this paper I will reevaluate the genetic position of Marrku, focussing on the very distinctive morphological structure of the Marrku verb and on why it suggests that at least two verb paradigms have been borrowed wholesale. A reconsideration of the evidence, I will argue, points to Marrku being a family-level isolate, rather than a member of the Iwaidjan family - though belonging, at a deeper level, to the Australian phylum.

A methodological option for building the mixed code lexicon
Petek Kurtboke

Mixed codes commonly develop in multilingual settings although their characterisation has been problematic in the study of Language Contact. The models used so far to interpret mixed data assume that the contact lexicon is already full at the start, with the entire vocabularies of L1 and L2 included in the repository. This has been done perhaps to tackle the problem of distinguishing between what counts as borrowing and what counts as code-switching. Traditionally borrowing has come to be seen as a diachronic process whereas code-switching as a synchronic one while the criteria for the classification of loans as either one or the other have never been truly reliable. A new approach to the lexicon is proposed as a result of corpus research with the lexicon considered empty at the start allowing the specification of the mixed code lexicon as an independent construct. It concentrates on usage as new meanings arise from the loose and varying co-occurrences of L1 and L2 words creating new units of meaning. . It is thus impossible to compile a list of entries in advance of analysis for the subsequent interpretation of the mixed code data However, a major question facing researchers who favour the empty lexicon approach is to be answered: "when does the mixed code establish itself?"

The transitive marker -im in Australian Indigenous English, creoles and hybrid languages: variation and change

Patrick McConvell and Jane Simpson

The transitive suffix -im on verbs is widespread in Pacific Pidgins and Creoles, including Australia. This paper will explore in a preliminary way the kinds of variation which exist in this marker within and between different varieties mainly focussing on the Northern Territory and the Kimberley of Western Australia. It is part of ongoing work on the Aboriginal Child Language Acquisition (ACLA) project and on a related but less advanced project to describe varieties of Indigenous Englishes and creoles across northern Australia. One of the issues to be dealt with is how to distinguish between this marker and the apparently at least partially homophonous 3rd person object pronoun im (written here as a separate word). In certain syntactic contexts it is evident that it is the transitive suffix which follows the verb eg

Ai bin kil-im im

Ai bin kil-im yu

But in other cases there can be apparent ambiguity

Ai bin kil-im ~ Ai bin kil im

The first parsing is consistent with a more basilectal variety in which zero anaphora of third person objects plays a role; the latter could be a more acrolectal variety in which the transitive marker is being lost (perhaps variably). In fact, the presence of -im is often taken to be a marker of basilect and its absence a marker of acrolect, often coupled with the notion of diachronic decreolisation. We will analyse some cases (including from Kimberley and Tennant Creek Aboriginal English) where there is variation, including age-coded data, to see if this hypothesis is supported.

Apart from syntactic tests we will look at possible phonetic differences between the suffix and the pronoun. In Kriol for instance the transitive marker is variably written -um, -am etc. as well as -im, unlike the pronoun which appears to have one form. We will look at whether the variants of the transitive marker represent conditioned allomorphy or rather allophones of a central short vowel, perhaps conditioned by the prosodic status of the suffix as part of the verb.

In some cases there is interaction with other morphology in English, and with traditional language morpho-syntactic restrictions, in mixed languages like Gurindji Kriol, which may also amplify loss of - im under certain conditions. This is briefly discussed.

Grammar and consciousness in language contact

Maarten Mous

In situations of language contact, identity can come to play a role. When it does, so does a certain level of consciousness about choice in language use. Speakers manipulate their language for identity purposes. In this way lexicon is commonly affected and grammar - not being accessible for conscious manipulation - is not. However, to some degree and some situations, grammar is affected and I will discuss the cases I have found where grammar is affected in conscious manipulation for identity.

Comprehending Ergative Marking and Word Order in Light Warlpiri and Gurindji Kriol

Carmel O'Shannessy and Felicity Meakins

Light Warlpiri (LW) and Gurindji Kriol (GK) are mixed languages spoken in northern Australia. They are systematic mixes of a traditional language (Warlpiri and Gurindji) and a contact variety (AbE/Kriol and Kriol respectively), bringing elements from both languages into functional competition with each other. With respect to argument disambiguation, both Warlpiri and Gurindji use a case marking system, whereas AbE/Kriol relies most on word order. We argue that one of the results of the competition between a case marking and a word order system in LW and GK has been optional ergative marking, and a more fixed SVO word order in GK. Previous work has described speakers' use of the ergative marker and word order (McConvell and Meakins, 2005; O'Shannessy, 2005). This paper considers interaction of the ergative marker and word order from the perspective of comprehension. In experimental task children and adults saw two events on a split screen video and heard transitive sentences with different combinations of case marking and word order. They chose the event which they thought best represented the sentence they heard. Results show that in both languages, children and adults pay attention to ergative marking when it is present. When it is not present the speakers differ - GK speakers use a word order strategy, but LW speakers still use a case-marking strategy (eg, no ergative = object). There are some developmental patterns in different ages of the children.

McConvell, P., and Meakins, F. (2005). Gurindji Kriol: A mixed language emerges from code-switching. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 25(1), 9-30.
O'Shannessy, C. (2005). Light Warlpiri: A new language. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 25(1), 31-57.

AUSTLANG: Australian Indigenous Languages Database - towards Phase 2 development

Kazuko Obata

AIATSIS has been developing a web-base Indigenous languages database since late 2004. The Phase 1 development took place from November 2004 - March 2005 during which time the framework of the database was developed and feedback sought. AIATSIS is now drawing a plan for the Phase 2 development. In this presentation, I will show proposed functions and layout of the database and seek feedback.