This book provides a description of Yintyingka, a Pama-Nyungan language of Cape York Peninsula in Australia. The language is no longer spoken, but the analysis is based on a range of archival materials from the 1920s to the 1990s, as well as the authors' fieldwork experience with neighbouring languages. This book pays special attention to the language in its social context, historical-comparative analysis, and the methods used to analyse the archival material.

The volume focuses on semantic shifts and motivation patterns in the lexicon. Its key feature is its lexico-typological orientation, i.e. a heavy emphasis on systematic cross-linguistic comparison. The book presents current theoretical and methodological trends in the study of semantic shifts and motivational patters based on an abundance of empirical findings across genetically, areally and typologically diverse languages.

Morrobolam is a Lamalamic (Paman

The first areal-typological exploration of agreement systems in the world's languages.

This volume offers a state-of-the-art survey of linguistic, anthropological, archaeological and historical work focused on Cape York Peninsula and the Gulf Country, in Australia’s northeast. The volume also honours Bruce Rigsby, emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of Queensland, whose work has inspired all of the contributors. The papers in the volume are organized in terms of five key themes, including the use of historical and archaeological methods to reconstruct aspects of language and social organization, anthropological and linguistic work uncovering aspects of world view embedded in languages and ethnographic data sets, the study of post-contact transformations in language and society, and the return of archival data to communities. Its thematic intersections draw together the varied disciplinary threads in an overview of the cultures and languages of the region, and will appeal to all those interested in Australian Aboriginal studies, linguistics, anthropology and associated disciplines.

This book is an exploration of the role of language at Warruwi Community, a remote Indigenous settlement in northern Australia. It explores how language use and people’s ideas about language are embedded in contemporary Indigenous life there. Using an ethnographic approach, the book examines what language at Warruwi means in the context of the history of the community, ongoing social and political changes and the continuing importance of ancestral traditions. Children growing up at Warruwi still learn to speak many small Indigenous languages. This is remarkable not just in the Australian context, where many Indigenous languages are no longer spoken, but around the world as this kind of multilingualism in small languages persists only in a few remaining pockets. The way that people use many languages in their daily life at Warruwi reveals how high levels of linguistic diversity can be maintained in a small community. This detailed study of the creation of linguistic diversity is relevant to sociolinguistics, linguistic typology, historical linguistics and evolutionary linguistics. More generally, this book is for linguists, anthropologists and anyone with an interest in contemporary Australian Indigenous lives.

The typological, contrastive, and descriptive studies in this volume investigate the strategies employed by the world’s languages to create complex denotations by combining two noun-like elements, together with the kinds of semantic relation they involve, and their acquisition by children. The term ‘binominal lexeme’ is employed to cover both noun-noun compounds and a range of other naming strategies, including prepositional compounds, relational compounds, construct forms, genitival constructions, and more. Overall, the volume suggests a new, cross-linguistic approach to the study of complex lexeme formation that cuts across the traditional boundaries between syntax, morphology, and lexicon.

Classical Aboriginal societies in Australia have commonly been described in terms of social organisation and local organisation. This book presents rich detail on a third and related domain that has not been given the same kind of attention: linguistic organisation. Basing their analyses on fieldwork among the Wik peoples of Cape York Peninsula, north Australia, Peter Sutton and Ken Hale show how cosmology, linguistic variation, language prehistory, clan totemic identities, geopolitics, land use and land ownership created a vibrant linguistic organisation in a classical Aboriginal society. This has been a society long in love with language and languages. Its people have richly imbued the domain of rights and interests in country—the foundations of their native title as recognised in Australian law—with rights and interests in the abundance of languages and dialects given to them at the start of the world.

Linguistic variation is a topic of ongoing interest to the field. Its description and its explanations continue to intrigue scholars from many different backgrounds. By taking a deliberately broad perspective on the matter, covering not only crosslinguistic and diachronic but also intralinguistic and interspeaker variation and examining phenomena ranging from negation over connectives to definite articles in well- and lesser-known languages, the volume furthers our understanding of variation in general. The papers offer new insights into, among other things, the theoretical notion of comparative concepts, the social or mental nature of language structure, the areal factor in lexical typology and the diachronic implications of semantic maps. The collection will thus be of relevance to typologists and historical linguists, as well as to people studying variation within the areas of cognitive and functional linguistics.

Siraya is a Formosan language once spoken around Tainan City in southwest Taiwan. This comprehensive study is based on an analysis of the language of the Siraya Gospel of St. Matthew, which was translated from the Dutch in 1661. It contains a grammar, lexicon and extensive text with interlinear glossing as well as an introduction with detailed background information. Siraya has many unique linguistic features, which are of great interest to the study of linguistic typology in general. They include various reduplication patterns, orientation prefixes (adding the notions of motion, location or comitation to a verb) and anticipating sequences. The latter are (usually) formal elements of the lexical verb, such as a first consonant or a first syllable, which are prefixed to the auxiliary. Siraya is also of crucial importance for the prehistory of Taiwan because it is one of the first languages to branch off from the Austronesian language family, which has more than 1200 members. The volume is a major contribution to the Siraya people who are keen to rehabilitate Siraya culture heritage and are endeavouring to learn their lost language again. It is a unique achievement in the endeavour to revitalise the traditional languages of Taiwan.