Harold Koch

The Creation of Morphological Zeroes

This paper is concerned with reanalyses that create zero exponents of morphological properties. It will survey a number of types of such reanalysis and try to make generalisations about what kinds of word-forms are liable to be reanalysed. The characteristics of these candidates for reanalysis include both the kinds of category information they code and the formal means by which this information is coded.

Central Australian Aboriginal English: In Comparison with the Morphosyntactic Categories of Kaytetye

Abstract Central Australian Aboriginal English includes features derived from an earlier Australian Pidgin English, mixed with aspects of colloquial English, and in addition shows the influence of the indigenous languages of Central Australia. This paper explores the way grammatical distinctions of one particular indigenous language, Kaytetye, are reflected in the Aboriginal English of speakers whose first language is Kaytetye. It is claimed that, although the forms are from English, their grammatical uses are determined to some extent by the morphosyntactic categories of Kaytetye. Topics explored include: personal pronouns, a kinship marker, prepositions, and the verbal category of “associated motion”.

Australian languages: A singular vision

This huge work provides a unique synthesis of comparative knowledge of Australian languages. It does so very much from the point of view of its sole author. This singleness of vision is both its strength and its weakness. On the one hand, it was bound to be provocative and to stimulate much debate and discussion among Australianists. On the other hand, readers unfamiliar with the relevant literature, which is now substantial, should not mistake this volume for a more or less neutral manual or textbook which canvasses all

George Augustus Robinson and the Documentation of Languages of South-Eastern New South Wales

Abstract George Augustus Robinson, best known as the conciliator of Tasmanian Aborigines and Chief Protector of Aborigines in the Port Phillip District (Victoria), has provided major sources of documentation for languages of Victoria and surrounding areas. These have become accessible in recent years through the editing and publication of his journals and vocabulary lists by Ian Clark. This paper studies in particular his materials on the languages of south-eastern New South Wales, describing the documents and inferring from them his conception of language and his methods of data collection. Although Robinson provided mainly wordlists written in an idiosyncratic English-based orthography, it is possible, by interpreting the wordlists in the light of background information in the journals and by comparing vocabulary items across wordlists and with those of other sources on the same languages, to extract a surprising amount of useful material on a group of poorly described languages — which can be used for purposes of linguistic typology, historical–comparative reconstruction, and heritage language recovery by Indigenous communities.

Teaching historical linguistics: A personal memoir

In the present chapter, Koch examines his years teaching Historical Linguistics and shares some techniques that had been successful in classroom.

Morpholological Borrowing and Genetic Relationship: A Review Article of Johanson, and Robbeets (eds). 2012: 'Copies Versus Cognates in Bound Morphology'

This edited volume adds to the literature on language contact. It specifically deals with the borrowing of morphology, and addresses the methodological issue of how to distinguish resemblances that represent borrowing (here called copying) from those that reflect cognation within genealogically related languages. Several studies offer empirical data on the scales of borrowability (or copiability in the terminology of this volume) that have been discovered—comparing morphological to lexical borrowing, inflectional to derivational, and distinguishing the likelihood of various kinds of inflectional borrowing. A number of papers attempt explanations for the scales in terms of semantic, structural or frequency factors. Proposals are also made regarding factors other than borrowing or cognation that may result in the sharing of morphological forms between languages. The findings concerning morphological borrowing are applied to several difficult and unresolved issues of genealogical relationship in languages of Eurasia and the Americas.