Lesley Stirling

Switch-Reference and Discourse Representation

Preface List of Abbreviations 1. Switch-reference phenomena 2. Functional extensions of switch-reference systems 3. Theoretical conceptions of switch-reference 4. Discourse representation theory and unification categorial grammar 5. A discourse representation theory account of switch-reference 6. Logophoricity Notes References Index.

The Absent Breast: Speaking of the Mastectomied Body

Worldwide, approximately 1 in 11 women have breast cancer at some time in their lifetime. The majority are successfully treated with surgery, then radiotherapy and/or chemo-therapy. Survival brings its own problems, however, including an underlying ontological problem: What is the part of the body left after a mastectomy? Women talking about their experiences of mastectomy are faced with complex referential tasks with regard to their bodies at different stages of the past and present, within different discourses (medical, sexual, maternal), and from different perspectives (the individual and the generic, their own perspective and that of their medical professionals). Drawing on anthropological research conducted among Australian women, we illustrate how women resolve difficulties of reference to the site of the mastectomy, and examine the shifts in perspective that are marked by different lexical choices.

Does Prosody Support or Direct Sentence Processing

This paper addresses the question of the way in which prosodic information affects syntactic processing in locally ambiguous sentences. Two studies were run. The first, based on Beach (1991), dealt with peoples judgements of the continuation of locally ambiguous sentence fragments of differing lengths. The second concerned ratings of normality of sentence types with differing prosodic contours. In the first, an effect of prosody was found over short but not over longer sentence fragments; in the second, some evidence was found of a prosodic effect in the judgement of normality. The behavioural data are related toacoustic analyses ofthe experimental materials. The implications of these studies for current sentence processing models are discussed.

Intonational Rises and Dialog Acts in the Australian English Map Task

Eight map task dialogs representative of General Australian English, were coded for speaker turn, and for dialog acts using a version of SWBDDAMSL, a dialog act annotation scheme. High, low, simple, and complex rising tunes, and any corresponding dialog act codes were then compared. Dialog acts corresponding to information requests were consistently realized as high-onset high rises((L+)H*H—H%).Howeverlow-onset high rises (e.g., L*H —H%) corresponded to a wider range of other “forward-looking” communicative functions, such as statements and action directives, and were rarely associated with information requests. Low-range rises (L*L—H%), by contrast, were mostly associated with backward-looking functions, like acknowledgments and responses, that is they were almost always used when the speaker was referring to what had occurred previously in the discourse. Two kinds of fall-rise tunes were also examined: the low-range fall-rise (H *L— H %) and the expanded range fall-rise (H * + L H —H %). The latter shared similar dialog functions with statement high rises, and were almost never associated with yes/no questions, whereas the low-range fall-rises were associated more with backward-looking functions, such as responses or acknowledgments. The Australian English statement high rise (usually realized as a L* H — H % tune) or “uptalk,” appears to be more closely related to the classic continuation rises, than to yes/no question rises of typologically-related varieties of English.

Analyzing communication in genetic consultations--a systematic review.

OBJECTIVE To systematically review studies that have analyzed communication within medical consultations involving genetic specialists and report on their findings and design. METHODS Drawing from PRISMA and appropriate guidelines for reviewing qualitative research, a systematic search of seven databases was conducted, followed by selection of studies for inclusion based on a set of criteria. Three authors conducted data extraction and narrative synthesis. RESULTS Twenty-two studies were identified and were heterogeneous in setting, design, and methods, with many including limited descriptions of health professionals involved. Despite this variability, studies generally pursued the following three main objectives: searching for structural patterns within consultations, investigating communication and genetic counseling concepts, and linking process with input- and outcome-measures. Structural patterns identified included clinician dialog dominating consultations, and talk being mostly biomedical. Counseling and communication concepts investigated were: risk communication, the negotiation of power and knowledge, and adherence to genetic counseling ideals. Attempts to link consultation data to input- or outcome-measures were often unsuccessful. CONCLUSION More interdisciplinary research, grounded in appropriate theoretical frameworks, is needed to explore inherent complexities in this setting. PRACTICE IMPLICATIONS Findings from this review can be used to guide the design of future research into the process of genetic consultations.

Granularity of locations referred to by place descriptions

Abstract Place descriptions are a predominant means of human spatial communication. Their automated interpretation still poses a challenge for geospatial services. This paper explores one issue of this interpretation process: determining the level of granularity to which a localization of a described place is possible. Knowing this finest possible level of granularity supports resolving place descriptions, for example, in geographic information retrieval. In particular, the focus is on integrating spatial relations into this process. To this end, a mechanistic procedure for determining the level of granularity is proposed and applied to a place descriptions corpus. Feasibility of the procedure is evaluated in a comparison of place descriptions with people’s self-reported position on a map. Findings show that the procedure delivers generally good results in agreement with the corresponding map locations.

How people describe their place: identifying predominant types of place descriptions

People communicate about locations using place descriptions. Despite the growth of mobile location- and context-aware applications, the automatic interpretation of place descriptions remains a challenge. Currently no software tools exist that are capable of understanding complex verbal spatial language. This paper explores a corpus of place descriptions collected through crowdsourcing mechanisms within a mobile game. It introduces a general classification scheme to annotate place descriptions according to different characteristic parameters and uses this scheme to demonstrate the existence of certain clusters of prevalent types of place descriptions in human communication. Research outcomes contribute to the common understanding of the way people refer to places, which is essential to support the development of intelligent tools and location based technologies.

Tense/Aspect Shifting in Kala Lagaw Ya Oral Narratives

Kala Lagaw Ya is the language of the Western Torres Strait islands, with two main dialects centred around Saibai Island and Mabuiag Island. It exhibits complex tense/aspect marking involving both temporal remoteness distinctions (‘metrical tense’) and aspectual distinctions. This article investigates the discourse-semantics of tense/aspect marking in a small corpus of oral traditional narratives from the Mabuiag dialect. Unsurprisingly, the resources of the ‘metrical tense system’ are not fully exploited in the narrative texts, which exhibit a restricted range of ‘narrative’ past tense marking including the Remote Past Perfective, a Remote Past Imperfective and a Present (or Non-Future) tense. The focus of the article is on patterns of distribution and shift between the Remote Past Perfective and the Present tense. Both these tenses are used extensively with ‘Narration’ function: to mark sequences of events on the narrative timeline. In some stories the Remote Past Perfective functions as the default framing tense, with the Present tending to be used in the middle of the story, and in particular in subjectively evaluated narrative ‘highpoints’. However stories are also found which are told predominantly in the Present tense. Patterns of consistent clustering vs. rapid alternations of the two tenses are also discussed and compared with the episodic and expressive structure of the stories. The article illustrates the usefulness of considering discourse data in understanding the meanings and functions of forms within an inflectional paradigm of this kind, and contributes to the range of language types for which tense/aspect shifting has been investigated.

Universals of Split Argument Coding and Morphological Neutralization: Why Kala Lagaw Ya Is Not as Bizarre as We Thought

Kala Lagaw Ya is the language of the western and central islands of the Torres Strait. It exhibits an extremely complex pattern of ‘split argument coding’ (‘split ergativity’), which has previously been considered typologically exceptional and problematic for widely discussed universals of argument coding dating back to work by Silverstein, Comrie and Dixon in the 1970s, and framed in terms of an ‘animacy’ or ‘nominal’ hierarchy. Furthermore, the two main dialects of the language, which centre around Saibai Island and Mabuiag Island, differ in the detail of their argument coding in interesting ways. In this paper we argue that once we take into account other typologically well-attested principles concerning the effect of markedness on neutralization in the morphological coding of grammatical categories, and in particular recent proposals about the typology of number marking systems, the Kala Lagaw Ya system falls into place as resulting from the unexceptional interaction of a number of universal tendencies. On this view, the case systems of the two dialects of Kala Lagaw Ya, while complex, appear not to be typologically exceptional. This account can be taken as a case study contributing to our understanding of universals of argument coding and how they relate to forces affecting the neutralization of morphological marking. The reframing of the Kala Lagaw Ya facts then has broader implications: it reinforces the value of viewing complex patterns as the result of the interaction of simpler, more regular forces, and in so doing it also lends further empirical weight to the universals of argument coding which Kala Lagaw Ya was previously thought to violate.

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