Alice Gaby

Remembrances of Times East Absolute Spatial Representations of Time in an Australian Aboriginal Community

How do people think about time? Here we describe representations of time in Pormpuraaw, a remote Australian Aboriginal community. Pormpuraawans’ representations of time differ strikingly from all others documented to date. Previously, people have been shown to represent time spatially from left to right or right to left, or from front to back or back to front. All of these representations are with respect to the body. Pormpuraawans instead arrange time according to cardinal directions: east to west. That is, time flows from left to right when one is facing south, from right to left when one is facing north, toward the body when one is facing east, and away from the body when one is facing west. These findings reveal a qualitatively different set of representations of time, with time organized in a coordinate frame that is independent from others reported previously. The results demonstrate that conceptions of even such fundamental domains as time can differ dramatically across cultures.

The Thaayorre think of Time Like They Talk of Space

Around the world, it is common to both talk and think about time in terms of space. But does our conceptualization of time simply reflect the space/time metaphors of the language we speak? Evidence from the Australian language Kuuk Thaayorre suggests not. Kuuk Thaayorre speakers do not employ active spatial metaphors in describing time. But this is not to say that spatial language is irrelevant to temporal construals: non-linguistic representations of time are shown here to covary with the linguistic system of describing space. This article contrasts two populations of ethnic Thaayorre from Pormpuraaw – one comprising Kuuk Thaayorre/English bilinguals and the other English-monolinguals – in order to distinguish the effects of language from environmental and other factors. Despite their common physical, social, and cultural context, the two groups differ in their representations of time in ways that are congruent with the language of space in Kuuk Thaayorre and English, respectively. Kuuk Thaayorre/English bilinguals represent time along an absolute east-to-west axis, in alignment with the high frequency of absolute frame of reference terms in Kuuk Thaayorre spatial description. The English-monolinguals, in contrast, represent time from left-to-right, aligning with the dominant relative frame of reference in English spatial description. This occurs in the absence of any east-to-west metaphors in Kuuk Thaayorre, or left-to-right metaphors in English. Thus the way these two groups think about time appears to reflect the language of space and not the language of time.

Valency mismatches and the coding of reciprocity in Australian languages

Abstract Reciprocals are characterized by a crossover of thematic roles within a single clause. Their peculiar semantics often creates special argument configurations not found in other clause types. While some languages either encode reciprocals by clearly divalent, transitive clauses, or clearly monovalent, intransitive clauses, others adopt a more ambivalent solution. We develop a typology of valency/transitivity mismatches in reciprocal constructions, based on a sample of Australian languages. These include: (i) monovalent clauses with a single ergative NP, (ii) mismatches between case marking and the apparent number of arguments, (iii) ergative marking on secondary predicates and instrumentals with an intransitive subject, and (iv) complex clause constructions sensitive to valency. Such mismatches, we argue, result from an “overlay problem”: both divalent and monovalent predicates in the semantic representation of prototypical reciprocal scenes have had a hand in shaping the morphosyntax of reciprocal constructions.

Describing cutting and breaking events in Kuuk Thaayorre

Abstract This paper presents the key Thaayorre verbs associated with events of cutting and breaking. It examines their intensional and extensional ranges; comparing prototypical usages with non-prototypical extensions. Although these Thaayorre verbs categorize the C&B semantic domain largely in accordance with the crosslinguistic patterns reported by Majid et al. (this issue), there are several interesting points of divergence. These include the union of breaking and opening events encoded by thuuth ‘pull (apart)’, and the various changes in argument structure that Thaayorre C&B verbs may undergo.

Reciprocal constructions and situation type

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Rebuilding Australia's Linguistic Profile: Recent Developments in Research on Australian Aboriginal Languages

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.

Kinship Semantics: Culture in the Lexicon

This chapter considers how cultural categories might be reflected in the lexicon. In particular, it argues that cultural norms can provide crucial evidence in discerning the internal semantic structure of lexical items. Evidence is garnered by taking a Cultural Linguistic approach to the study of kin terms in Kuuk Thaayorre, an Australian Aboriginal language spoken on the west coast of Cape York Peninsula. The Kuuk Thaayorre lexicon comprises four distinct lexical systems (‘sublexica’), each of which expresses the same range of kin relationships at different levels of detail. The comparison of equivalent (partially co-extensive) terms from each of the sublexica sheds light on the internal structure of the cultural categories that these terms express. Moreover, behavioural norms reciprocally contribute evidence of the covert semantic structure of the kin terms themselves. The multi-stratal composition of the Kuuk Thaayorre kin lexicon thus offers an ideal opportunity to explore the vast semantic web that connects words to one another and to the world they are spoken within.

The grammar of exchange: A comparative study of reciprocal constructions across languages

Cultures are built on social exchange. Most languages have dedicated grammatical machinery for expressing this. To demonstrate that statistical methods can also be applied to grammatical meaning, we here ask whether the underlying meanings of these grammatical constructions are based on shared common concepts. To explore this, we designed video stimuli of reciprocated actions (e.g., “giving to each other”) and symmetrical states (e.g., “sitting next to each other”), and with the help of a team of linguists collected responses from 20 languages around the world. Statistical analyses revealed that many languages do, in fact, share a common conceptual core for reciprocal meanings but that this is not a universally expressed concept. The recurrent pattern of conceptual packaging found across languages is compatible with the view that there is a shared non-linguistic understanding of reciprocation. But, nevertheless, there are considerable differences between languages in the exact extensional patterns, highlighting that even in the domain of grammar semantics is highly language-specific.

Some participants are more equal than others: Case and the composition of arguments in Kuuk Thaayorre

Publisher Summary This chapter surveys a range of strategies available to the Kuuk Thaayorre speaker for emphasizing individuals within a larger group. Kuuk Thaayorre is a Paman language of Queensland, Australia. It is a predominantly dependent-marking language in which the grammatical function is signaled solely by nominal/pronominal case forms. The Kuuk Thaayorre case system distinguishes the grammatical functions of intransitive subject, transitive subject, and transitive object. Formal identity among case suffixes exists across many non-core cases as well. Similarly, singular pronouns have different forms for accusative and genitive cases, while non-singular (dual and plural) pronouns have a single form. The fact that Kuuk Thaayorre case marking appears at the periphery of the noun phrase suggests that the case morphs are postpositional enclitics. Yet, their formal irregularity is more characteristic of inflectional affixes. For most nouns, a single nominal-suffix form expresses both ergative and instrumental cases. Possessive pronouns inflect for case when in phrase-final position and have unambiguous ergative and instrumental forms.

Diversity in Spatial Language Within Communities: The Interplay of Culture, Language and Landscape in Representations of Space (Short Paper).

Significant diversity exists in the way languages structure spatial reference, and this has been shown to correlate with diversity in non-linguistic spatial behaviour. However, most research in spatial language has focused on diversity between languages: on which spatial referential strategies are represented in the grammar, and to a lesser extent which of these strategies are preferred overall in a given language. However, comparing languages as a whole and treating each language as a single data point provides a very partial picture of linguistic spatial behaviour, failing to recognise the very significant diversity that exists within languages, a largely under-investigated but now emerging field of research. This paper focuses on language-internal diversity, and on the central role of a range of sociocultural and demographic factors that intervene in the relationship between humans, languages, and the physical environments in which communities live.