ABORIGINAL LANGUAGE EVOLUTION IN URBAN CONTEXTS

Grant number: DE180100872 | Funding period: 2018 - 2022

Completed

Abstract

This project aims to investigate how Aboriginal languages evolve in, and shape, Aboriginal engagement in cities. It will focus on Darwin-based speakers of Murrinhpatha, a language with unusually complex word structure. The expected outcome of this project is an understanding of linguistic complexity in an urban context.

Related publications (8)

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Aboriginal linguistic exchange in an Australian city

J Mansfield

2022-09-01

Tropical northern Australia is a region of high linguistic diversity, with dozens of language varieties each spoken by a small num..

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Category Clustering and Morphological Learning

John Mansfield, Carmen Saldana, Peter Hurst, Rachel Nordlinger, Sabine Stoll, Balthasar Bickel, Andrew Perfors

2022-02-01

Inflectional affixes expressing the same grammatical category (e.g., subject agreement) tend to appear in the same morphological p..

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Fricative contrasts and neutralization in Marri Tjevin

John Mansfield, Ian Green

2021-10-05

Marri Tjevin is the language of the Rak Thangkurral and Rak Nadirri people of the Daly River region in northern Australia. Unusual..

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Clause chaining and the utterance phrase: Syntax-prosody mapping in Matukar Panau

John Mansfield, Danielle Barth

2021-07-17

Clause chaining is a form of syntactic dependency holding between a series of clauses, typically expressing temporal or causal rel..

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Positional dependency in Murrinhpatha: expanding the typology of non-canonical morphotactics

Rachel Nordlinger, John Mansfield

2021-01-27

Principles of morphotactics are a major source of morphological diversity amongst the world’s languages, and it is well-known that..

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The word as a unit of internal predictability

John Mansfield

2021-01-01

A long-standing problem in linguistics is how to define word. Recent research has focused on the incompatibility of diverse defini..

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Category clustering: A probabilistic bias in the morphology of verbal agreement marking

John Mansfield, Sabine Stoll, Balthasar Bickel

2020-06-01

Recent research has revealed several languages (e.g. Chintang, Rarámuri, Tagalog, Murrinhpatha) that challenge the general expecta..

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Epistemic authority and sociolinguistic stance in an Australian Aboriginal language

John Mansfield

2019-04-01

Murrinhpatha, an Aboriginal language of northern Australia, has an initial k-alternation in verbs that has hitherto been resistant..

University of Melbourne Researchers