Alan Dench

Catching Language: The Standing Challenge of Grammar Writing

This is the first book to focus on the problem of writing grammars of little-known languages, a task of major urgency as linguists face the challenge of documenting the many endangered languages around the world. The chapters, all written by distinguished specialists, address the many questions the author of a reference grammar must tackle as they destil the regularities of a whole language into a single integrated volume.

The historical development of pronoun paradigms in the Pilbara region of Western Australia

Abstract This paper presents a detailed account of the changes affecting pronoun paradigms in a sample of thirteen languages of the Pilbara region of Western Australia. The reconstruction demonstrates a number of interesting diachronic trends including analogical levelling, the loss and later reintroduction of inclusive/exclusive person categories and the waxing and waning of nominative/ergative case syncretisms. In addition, it appears that many of the changes are the result of pattern diffusion. Taken together, the changes detailed in this study present a rich catalogue of the kinds of changes which can be expected to have occurred in the development of Australian languages more generally.

Now or Then? The Clitic -rru in Panyjima: Temporal Properties in Discourse

The clitic -rru in Panyjima, glossed as ‘now’ by Dench, appears not only in present tense but also in past and future clauses. This paper analyses the uses of this clitic and its interactions with tenses at clause level, as well as its role in the wider discourse context. We argue that -rru has temporal and contrastive properties, more specifically that -rru modifies the time of the eventuality denoted and signals a change: it introduces a contrast with an earlier state of affairs corresponding to the negation of the eventuality denoted. Thus temporal progression is also inferred. We propose to represent this contrast as a presupposition that -rru introduces, using Discourse Representation Theory (DRT). We also show that in discourse, -rru is used to introduce new subtopics, thus expressing contrasts at this wider level as well. Discourse relations and their temporal inferences are analysed using Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT). We conclude that, while -rru often corresponds to the adverb ‘then’ in English, its contrastive properties liken it more to the adverb ‘now’ in other languages, especially when the latter is used in non-present time contexts.

A semantic type-driven account of verb-formation patterns in Panyjima

In this paper we propose a semantic type-driven account of verb-formation patterns in Panyjima. By offering an explicit theory for the construal of semantically simplex event descriptions from morphologically complex verbal stems, we flesh out intuitions dating back to Clark and Clark (1979) about the role of derivational morphology in the interpretation of derived verbs, especially denominal verbs. This latter point is of particular relevance to a general theory of verb meaning (inclusive of, but not limited to, Aktionsart/lexical aspect), as most formal theories of lexical semantics have been primarily developed for languages with a rich verbal lexicon. By contrast, Australian languages often have a much smaller verbal lexicon and rely more heavily on productive processes of verbalization. The challenge we intend to meet is to provide a formal analysis that matches the productive morphology of the language under investigation. We offer an implementation couched within the Type Composition Logic (TCL) of Asher (2011), which demonstrates how TCL can successfully capture the contextual interpretation of productively derived Panyjima verbs.

Descriptive theories, explanatory theories, and Basic Linguistic Theory

Linguists often distinguish work they characterize as descriptive from work they characterize as theoretical. Similarly, linguists often characterize certain work as atheoretical. This label is sometimes applied, not only to descriptive work on particular languages, but also occasionally to crosslinguistic typological work. I argue in this chapter that this way of talking represents a fundamental confusion about the relationship between theory and description. First, there is no such thing as atheoretical description. Second, although it is confused to talk about theory and description as contrastive notions, it does make sense to talk about a contrast between description and explanation. I further argue that there is a need for both descriptive theories and explanatory theories. Descriptive theories (or theoretical frameworks) are theories about what languages are like. They are theories about what tools we need in order to provide adequate descriptions of individual languages. Explanatory theories (or theoretical frameworks), in contrast, are theories about why languages are the way they are. The distinction between descriptive theories and explanatory theories is not widely recognized in linguistics, although it is not hard to identify the historical explanation for this. First, pregenerative theories, such as American structuralism, explicitly disavowed the goal of constructing an explanatory theory. As such they were examples of descriptive theories, but the underlying assumption was that that was the only type of theory needed. Generative grammar, in contrast, has aimed at being an explanatory theory. Furthermore, a central tenet of generative grammar, especially clear in the work of Chomsky since the mid-1970s (e.g. Chomsky 1973), has been the idea that a single theory can serve simultaneously as a descriptive theory and as an explanatory theory. Such a view follows from Chomskys ideas about innateness: if one believes that languages are the way they are because of our innate linguistic knowledge, then a theory about that innate linguistic knowledge will simultaneously serve as a theory about what languages are like and as a theory about why they are that way. Curiously, however, many linguists who reject Chomskys views about innateness seem to implicitly accept the Chomskyan view that a single theory will serve both theoretical goals. Many functionalists, in particular, propose kinds of explanations for why languages are the way they are that are radically different from those of Chomsky, yet they often see questions of how to describe languages as the domain of formal linguists, confusing issues of descriptive theory with issues of explanatory theory. In this chapter, I examine the implications of rejecting the Chomskyan view of a single theory serving both theoretical goals, and examine the question of what sort of theory will serve as an adequate descriptive theory. I argue that what Dixon (1997) calls “basic linguistic theory” will serve as such a descriptive theory. This paper is primarily directed at linguists who can be construed as functionalist, using the term in a broad sense that includes most work in typology and work by descriptive linguists. The central issue discussed in this paper is what sort of theory we need for linguistic description, if one adopts a functionalist view of language, which for the purposes of this paper can be characterized as the view that functional or grammar-external principles play a central role in explaining why languages are the way they are.

Tense, Aspect, Modality and Evidentiality in Australian Languages: Foreword

The articles included in this issue of the Australian Journal of Linguistics, along with the article ‘The functions of reported speech and thought in Umpithamu narratives’ by Jean-Christophe Verstraete in 31(4), represent a thematic collection of work conducted as part of the Tense, Aspect, Modality and Evidentiality in Australian Aboriginal Languages (TAMEAL) project, funded under a European Commission FP7 Marie-Curie International Research Scholar Exchange Scheme (2009 2013). The project has been designed to bring together the grammatical description and typological investigation of Australian languages with the formal semantic investigation of the categories of tense, aspect, modality and evidentiality (TAME), in the understanding that these areas have much to offer one another. The two principal goals of the project are to further our understanding of Australian languages through detailed description of their TAME categories armed with the most current analytical tools of semantic and pragmatic theory, and to refine those theories through their reflective application to that description. To date, most work in the development of a unified theoretical framework for TAME has relied on analyses of these categories in the better known languages of Europe, but ultimately, a successful general theory must be informed by and seek to explain patterns in a much wider range of languages. Australian Aboriginal languages offer fertile ground for TAME studies. The apparent rarity of inflected evidentials in these languages demands confirmation and also leads us to investigate coding of