Rachel Nordlinger
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 749011 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Rachel Nordlinger |
| NOMBRES | Rachel |
| APELLIDO | Nordlinger |
| FIRMA | NORDLINGER R |
| AFILIACIONES | The University of Melbourne |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4126-8022 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 34 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 246 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 33 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1995 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 7 |
Serial verbs in Australian Indigenous languages
Australian languages are not typically thought of as serializing languages, although recent research has led to serial verbs being reported for a few of them. In this paper we provide the first comprehensive study of serial verb constructions across Australian languages, resulting from a survey of 50 Pama-Nyungan and non-Pama-Nyungan languages. We find that serial verb constructions are more prevalent amongst these languages than previous researc…
Incremental processing in a polysynthetic language (Murrinhpatha)
Language processing is rapidly incremental, but evidence bearing upon this assumption comes from very few languages. In this paper we report on a study of incremental processing in Murrinhpatha, a polysynthetic Australian language, which expresses complex sentence-level meanings in a single verb, the full meaning of which is not clear until the final morph. Forty native Murrinhpatha speakers participated in a visual world eyetracking experiment i…
An acquisition sketch of polysynthetic verbal morphology in Murrinhpatha
How Does Speaking A Free Word Order Language Influence Sentence Planning and Production? Evidence From Pitjantjatjara (Pama‐Nyungan, Australia)
Sentence production is a stage‐like process of mapping a conceptual representation to the linear speech signal via grammatical rules. While the typological diversity of languages is vast and thus must necessarily influence sentence production, psycholinguistic studies of diverse languages are comparatively rare. Here, we present data from a sentence planning and production study in Pitjantjatjara, an Australian Indigenous language that has highly…
The Typology of Reciprocal Constructions
Reciprocal constructions involve a complex mapping of semantics onto morphosyntax, requiring multiple propositions to be overlaid onto a single clause and the permutation of semantic roles within the set of participants involved. This complexity challenges the standard processes relating predicates to situations, and thus languages arrive at a great diversity of solutions for how reciprocal situations are encoded within a single clausal structure…
Uncovering ergative use in Murrinhpatha
Murrinhpatha, a non-Pama-Nyungan language from the Daly region of the Northern Territory of Australia, has an extant ergative case marker that has been reported to be very rare in use. In this paper we report on the use of ergative marking in an experimental study of sentence production. Forty-six adult L1 speakers of Murrinhpatha were asked to describe a series of unrelated bivalent scenes that were manipulated for humanness ( human) in the agen…
Why we need a gradient approach to word order
This article argues for a gradient approach to word order, which treats word order preferences, both within and across languages, as a continuous variable. Word order variability should be regarded as a basic assumption, rather than as something exceptional. Although this approach follows naturally from the emergentist usage-based view of language, we argue that it can be beneficial for all frameworks and linguistic domains, including language ac…
Bridging Australian Indigenous language learner’s guides with SLA materials development frameworks
The learner’s guide (LG) is a genre of pedagogical materials for Australian Indigenous languages, but LGs developed by field linguists are often questioned regarding their capacity to effectively facilitate language learning and, eventually, language revitalisation. This reflects a gap in the literature where applied linguistics perspectives are limited in Indigenous language studies, and vice versa. This study aims to address this gap by examini…
Sentence planning and production in Murrinhpatha, an Australian 'free word order' language
Psycholinguistic theories are based on a very small set of unrepresentative languages, so it is as yet unclear how typological variation shapes mechanisms supporting language use. In this article we report the first on-line experimental study of sentence production in an Australian free word order language: Murrinhpatha. Forty-six adult native speakers of Murrinhpatha described a series of unrelated transitive scenes that were manipulated for hum…
Positional dependency in Murrinhpatha
Principles of morphotactics are a major source of morphological diversity amongst the world’s languages, and it is well-known that languages exhibit many different types of deviation from a canonical ideal in which there is a unique and consistent mapping between function and form. In this paper we present data from Murrinhpatha (non-Pama-Nyungan, northern Australia) that demonstrates a type of non-canonical morphotactics so far unattested in the…
The impact of national standardized literacy and numeracy testing on children and teaching staff in remote Australian Indigenous communities
All educational testing is intended to have consequences, which are assumed to be beneficial, but tests may also have unintended, negative consequences (Messick, 1989). The issue is particularly important in the case of large-scale standardized tests, such as Australia’s National Assessment Program - Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN), the intended benefits of which are increased accountability and improved educational outcomes. The NAPLAN purpose is…
The Alignment of Prosody and Clausal Structure in Dalabon
Comparisons of prosodically defined units and grammatical structure in typologically diverse languages may reveal insights into how language is processed. This paper presents examples of intonation units comprising two or more verbs in Dalabon, a polysynthetic head-marking language from Australia. The prosody, semantics and grammar of these multi-verb intonational units is examined and it is shown that intonation is used as a delimitative device …
Linguistic diversity in first language acquisition research
The field of first language acquisition (FLA) needs to take into account data from the broadest typological array of languages and language-learning environments if it is to identify potential universals in child language development, and how these interact with socio-cultural mechanisms of acquisition. Yet undertaking FLA research in remote field-based situations, where the majority of the world's languages are spoken and acquired, poses challen…
Constituency and Grammatical Relations in Australian languages
Australian languages have had a signifi cant impact on the theoretical and typological stage over the last 50 years
The languages of Australia in linguistic research
The Acquisition of Polysynthetic Languages
One of the major challenges in acquiring a language is being able to use morphology as an adult would, and thus, a considerable amount of acquisition research has focused on morphological production and comprehension. Most of this research, however, has focused on the acquisition of morphology in isolating languages, or languages (such as English) with limited inflectional morphology. The nature of the learning task is different, and potentially …
The Languages and Linguistics of Australia
The Languages and Linguistics of Australia: A Comprehensive Guide is part of the multi-volume reference work on the languages and linguistics of the continents of the world. The volume provides a thorough overview of Australian languages, including their linguistic structures, their genetic relationships, and issues of language maintenance and revitalisation. Australian English, Aboriginal English and other contact varieties are also discussed
Australia Loves Language Puzzles
The Australian Computational and Linguistics Olympiad (OzCLO) started in 2008 in only two locations and has since grown to a nationwide competition with almost 1500 high school students participating in 2013. An Australian team has participated in the International Linguistics Olympiad (IOL) every year since 2009. This paper describes how the competition is run (with a regional first round and a final national round) and the organisation of the c…
A Grammar of Bilinarra
Felicity Meakins was awarded the Kenneth L. Hale Award 2021 by the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) for outstanding work on the documentation of endangered languages This volume provides the first comprehensive description of Bilinarra, a Pama-Nyungan language of the Victoria River District of the Northern Territory (Australia). Bilinarra is a highly endangered language with only one speaker remaining in 2012 and no child learners. The materia…
A Grammar of Bilinarra
This volume provides the first comprehensive description of Bilinarra, a Pama-Nyungan language of the Victoria River District of the Northern Territory (Australia). Bilinarra is a highly endangered language with only one speaker remaining in 2012 and no child learners. The materials on which this grammatical description is based were collected by the authors over a 20 year period from the last first-language speakers of the language, most of whom…
The Tense, Aspect and Modality System in Murrinh-Patha
This paper is an overview of the tense, aspect and modality (TAM) system in Murrinh-Patha, a polysynthetic language of the Daly River region of northern Australia. Our aim is to provide a detailed account of the range of TAM categories and their uses, highlighting along the way areas of interest for theoretical semantic analysis. We build here on earlier descriptions of tense, aspect and mood in Murrinh-Patha, most notably work by Street, and arg…
Transitivity in Murrinh-Patha
In this paper I discuss transitivity in Murrinh-Patha, a non-Pama-Nyungan polysynthetic language from northern Australia. I survey the range of bivalent clauses in Murrinh-Patha and their morphosyntactic properties, and consider their analysis in terms of definitions of transitivity in the cross-linguistic literature. I argue that syntactic definitions of transitivity, while compatible with the Murrinh-Patha data, are empirically unrevealing sinc…
Verbal morphology in Murrinh-Patha
Nominal juxtaposition in Australian languages
It is well known that Australian languages make heavy use of nominal juxtaposition in a wide variety of functions, but there is little discussion in the theoretical literature of how such juxtapositions should be analysed. We discuss a range of data from Australian languages illustrating how multiple nominals share a single grammatical function within the clause. We argue that such constructions should be treated syntactically as set-valued gramm…
When is a temporal marker not a tense
In her recent Language paper, Tonhauser (2007, henceforth T07) provides a comprehensive in-depth discussion of the semantics of two nominal temporal markers occurring in Paraguayan Guaraní, based on her fieldwork study and subsequent Ph.D. T explicitly situates her article as arguing against the claims of our Language article (Nordlinger & Sadler 2004, henceforth NS04), which presents a crosslinguistic study of the inflectional categories of tens…
Nominal Tense in Crosslinguistic Perspective
It is a general assumption in linguistic theory that the categories of tense, aspect, and mood (TAM) are inflectional categories of verbal classes only. In a number of languages around the world, however, nominals and other NP constituents are also inflected for these categories. In this article we provide a comprehensive survey of tense/aspect/mood marking on NP constituents across the world's languages. Two distinct types are identified: PROPOS…
Verbal morphology in Murrinh-Patha
Linguistic diversity in first language acquisition research
The field of first language acquisition (FLA) needs to take into account data from the broadest typological array of languages and language-learning environments if it is to identify potential universals in child language development, and how these interact with socio-cultural mechanisms of acquisition. Yet undertaking FLA research in remote field-based situations, where the majority of the world's languages are spoken and acquired, poses challen…
The Tense, Aspect and Modality System in Murrinh-Patha
This paper is an overview of the tense, aspect and modality (TAM) system in Murrinh-Patha, a polysynthetic language of the Daly River region of northern Australia. Our aim is to provide a detailed account of the range of TAM categories and their uses, highlighting along the way areas of interest for theoretical semantic analysis. We build here on earlier descriptions of tense, aspect and mood in Murrinh-Patha, most notably work by Street, and arg…
Valency mismatches and the coding of reciprocity in Australian languages
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,…
The Languages and Linguistics of Australia
The Languages and Linguistics of Australia: A Comprehensive Guide is part of the multi-volume reference work on the languages and linguistics of the continents of the world. The volume provides a thorough overview of Australian languages, including their linguistic structures, their genetic relationships, and issues of language maintenance and revitalisation. Australian English, Aboriginal English and other contact varieties are also discussed
Spearing the Emu Drinking
Studies of subordination in Australian Aboriginal languages have been heavily influenced by Hale's foundational paper on the ‘adjoined relative clause’—a non-embedded, multifunctional subordinate clause type found in Warlpiri and a ‘large number of Australian languages’ [Hale K 1976 Hale, K. 1976. “‘The adjoined relative clause in Australia’”. In Grammatical Categories in Australian Languages, Edited by: Dixon, RMW. 78–105. AIAS Canberra. [Google…
Tense Beyond the Verb
Sentence planning and production in Murrinhpatha, an Australian 'free word order' language
Psycholinguistic theories are based on a very small set of unrepresentative languages, so it is as yet unclear how typological variation shapes mechanisms supporting language use. In this article we report the first on-line experimental study of sentence production in an Australian free word order language: Murrinhpatha. Forty-six adult native speakers of Murrinhpatha described a series of unrelated transitive scenes that were manipulated for hum…
Why we need a gradient approach to word order
This article argues for a gradient approach to word order, which treats word order preferences, both within and across languages, as a continuous variable. Word order variability should be regarded as a basic assumption, rather than as something exceptional. Although this approach follows naturally from the emergentist usage-based view of language, we argue that it can be beneficial for all frameworks and linguistic domains, including language ac…
The Alignment of Prosody and Clausal Structure in Dalabon
Comparisons of prosodically defined units and grammatical structure in typologically diverse languages may reveal insights into how language is processed. This paper presents examples of intonation units comprising two or more verbs in Dalabon, a polysynthetic head-marking language from Australia. The prosody, semantics and grammar of these multi-verb intonational units is examined and it is shown that intonation is used as a delimitative device …
Nominal juxtaposition in Australian languages
It is well known that Australian languages make heavy use of nominal juxtaposition in a wide variety of functions, but there is little discussion in the theoretical literature of how such juxtapositions should be analysed. We discuss a range of data from Australian languages illustrating how multiple nominals share a single grammatical function within the clause. We argue that such constructions should be treated syntactically as set-valued gramm…
From prefixes to suffixes
This article provides a counterexample to the commonly held, if unexamined, proposition that morphemes reconstructed as affixes do not change their position with respect to the root. We do not expect to find that a proto-prefix has suffix reflexes, nor that a proto-suffix has prefix reflexes. In this paper we show, through detailed reconstruction, that paradigms of class/case suffixes in a number of Northern Australian languages derive historical…
The Typology of Reciprocal Constructions
Reciprocal constructions involve a complex mapping of semantics onto morphosyntax, requiring multiple propositions to be overlaid onto a single clause and the permutation of semantic roles within the set of participants involved. This complexity challenges the standard processes relating predicates to situations, and thus languages arrive at a great diversity of solutions for how reciprocal situations are encoded within a single clausal structure…
Uncovering ergative use in Murrinhpatha
Murrinhpatha, a non-Pama-Nyungan language from the Daly region of the Northern Territory of Australia, has an extant ergative case marker that has been reported to be very rare in use. In this paper we report on the use of ergative marking in an experimental study of sentence production. Forty-six adult L1 speakers of Murrinhpatha were asked to describe a series of unrelated bivalent scenes that were manipulated for humanness ( human) in the agen…
When is a temporal marker not a tense
In her recent Language paper, Tonhauser (2007, henceforth T07) provides a comprehensive in-depth discussion of the semantics of two nominal temporal markers occurring in Paraguayan Guaraní, based on her fieldwork study and subsequent Ph.D. T explicitly situates her article as arguing against the claims of our Language article (Nordlinger & Sadler 2004, henceforth NS04), which presents a crosslinguistic study of the inflectional categories of tens…
Case stacking in realizational morphology
Case stacking, the phenomenon whereby a single word may bear multiple cases reflecting its relation to a number of different syntactic elements, is an important phenomenon both for the development of theories of inflectional morphology and for our understanding of the relation between morphology and syntax. However, to date it has received virtually no attention from theoretical morphology. Working within the inferential-realizational framework o…
Australia Loves Language Puzzles
The Australian Computational and Linguistics Olympiad (OzCLO) started in 2008 in only two locations and has since grown to a nationwide competition with almost 1500 high school students participating in 2013. An Australian team has participated in the International Linguistics Olympiad (IOL) every year since 2009. This paper describes how the competition is run (with a regional first round and a final national round) and the organisation of the c…
Split Tense and Mood Inflection in Wambaya
Proceedings of the Twenty-First Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on Historical Issues in Sociolinguistics/Social Issues in Historical Linguistics (1995)
Constructive Case
Revisiting Proto-Mirndi
Tense Beyond the Verb
Nominal Tense in Crosslinguistic Perspective
It is a general assumption in linguistic theory that the categories of tense, aspect, and mood (TAM) are inflectional categories of verbal classes only. In a number of languages around the world, however, nominals and other NP constituents are also inflected for these categories. In this article we provide a comprehensive survey of tense/aspect/mood marking on NP constituents across the world's languages. Two distinct types are identified: PROPOS…
From prefixes to suffixes
This article provides a counterexample to the commonly held, if unexamined, proposition that morphemes reconstructed as affixes do not change their position with respect to the root. We do not expect to find that a proto-prefix has suffix reflexes, nor that a proto-suffix has prefix reflexes. In this paper we show, through detailed reconstruction, that paradigms of class/case suffixes in a number of Northern Australian languages derive historical…
Spearing the Emu Drinking
Studies of subordination in Australian Aboriginal languages have been heavily influenced by Hale's foundational paper on the ‘adjoined relative clause’—a non-embedded, multifunctional subordinate clause type found in Warlpiri and a ‘large number of Australian languages’ [Hale K 1976 Hale, K. 1976. “‘The adjoined relative clause in Australia’”. In Grammatical Categories in Australian Languages, Edited by: Dixon, RMW. 78–105. AIAS Canberra. [Google…
Case stacking in realizational morphology
Case stacking, the phenomenon whereby a single word may bear multiple cases reflecting its relation to a number of different syntactic elements, is an important phenomenon both for the development of theories of inflectional morphology and for our understanding of the relation between morphology and syntax. However, to date it has received virtually no attention from theoretical morphology. Working within the inferential-realizational framework o…
Valency mismatches and the coding of reciprocity in Australian languages
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,…
When is a temporal marker not a tense
In her recent Language paper, Tonhauser (2007, henceforth T07) provides a comprehensive in-depth discussion of the semantics of two nominal temporal markers occurring in Paraguayan Guaraní, based on her fieldwork study and subsequent Ph.D. T explicitly situates her article as arguing against the claims of our Language article (Nordlinger & Sadler 2004, henceforth NS04), which presents a crosslinguistic study of the inflectional categories of tens…
Nominal juxtaposition in Australian languages
It is well known that Australian languages make heavy use of nominal juxtaposition in a wide variety of functions, but there is little discussion in the theoretical literature of how such juxtapositions should be analysed. We discuss a range of data from Australian languages illustrating how multiple nominals share a single grammatical function within the clause. We argue that such constructions should be treated syntactically as set-valued gramm…
Verbal morphology in Murrinh-Patha
Transitivity in Murrinh-Patha
In this paper I discuss transitivity in Murrinh-Patha, a non-Pama-Nyungan polysynthetic language from northern Australia. I survey the range of bivalent clauses in Murrinh-Patha and their morphosyntactic properties, and consider their analysis in terms of definitions of transitivity in the cross-linguistic literature. I argue that syntactic definitions of transitivity, while compatible with the Murrinh-Patha data, are empirically unrevealing sinc…
The Tense, Aspect and Modality System in Murrinh-Patha
This paper is an overview of the tense, aspect and modality (TAM) system in Murrinh-Patha, a polysynthetic language of the Daly River region of northern Australia. Our aim is to provide a detailed account of the range of TAM categories and their uses, highlighting along the way areas of interest for theoretical semantic analysis. We build here on earlier descriptions of tense, aspect and mood in Murrinh-Patha, most notably work by Street, and arg…
A Grammar of Bilinarra
Felicity Meakins was awarded the Kenneth L. Hale Award 2021 by the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) for outstanding work on the documentation of endangered languages This volume provides the first comprehensive description of Bilinarra, a Pama-Nyungan language of the Victoria River District of the Northern Territory (Australia). Bilinarra is a highly endangered language with only one speaker remaining in 2012 and no child learners. The materia…
A Grammar of Bilinarra
This volume provides the first comprehensive description of Bilinarra, a Pama-Nyungan language of the Victoria River District of the Northern Territory (Australia). Bilinarra is a highly endangered language with only one speaker remaining in 2012 and no child learners. The materials on which this grammatical description is based were collected by the authors over a 20 year period from the last first-language speakers of the language, most of whom…
Constituency and Grammatical Relations in Australian languages
Australian languages have had a signifi cant impact on the theoretical and typological stage over the last 50 years
The languages of Australia in linguistic research
The Acquisition of Polysynthetic Languages
One of the major challenges in acquiring a language is being able to use morphology as an adult would, and thus, a considerable amount of acquisition research has focused on morphological production and comprehension. Most of this research, however, has focused on the acquisition of morphology in isolating languages, or languages (such as English) with limited inflectional morphology. The nature of the learning task is different, and potentially …
The Languages and Linguistics of Australia
The Languages and Linguistics of Australia: A Comprehensive Guide is part of the multi-volume reference work on the languages and linguistics of the continents of the world. The volume provides a thorough overview of Australian languages, including their linguistic structures, their genetic relationships, and issues of language maintenance and revitalisation. Australian English, Aboriginal English and other contact varieties are also discussed
Australia Loves Language Puzzles
The Australian Computational and Linguistics Olympiad (OzCLO) started in 2008 in only two locations and has since grown to a nationwide competition with almost 1500 high school students participating in 2013. An Australian team has participated in the International Linguistics Olympiad (IOL) every year since 2009. This paper describes how the competition is run (with a regional first round and a final national round) and the organisation of the c…
Linguistic diversity in first language acquisition research
The field of first language acquisition (FLA) needs to take into account data from the broadest typological array of languages and language-learning environments if it is to identify potential universals in child language development, and how these interact with socio-cultural mechanisms of acquisition. Yet undertaking FLA research in remote field-based situations, where the majority of the world's languages are spoken and acquired, poses challen…
The Alignment of Prosody and Clausal Structure in Dalabon
Comparisons of prosodically defined units and grammatical structure in typologically diverse languages may reveal insights into how language is processed. This paper presents examples of intonation units comprising two or more verbs in Dalabon, a polysynthetic head-marking language from Australia. The prosody, semantics and grammar of these multi-verb intonational units is examined and it is shown that intonation is used as a delimitative device …
The impact of national standardized literacy and numeracy testing on children and teaching staff in remote Australian Indigenous communities
All educational testing is intended to have consequences, which are assumed to be beneficial, but tests may also have unintended, negative consequences (Messick, 1989). The issue is particularly important in the case of large-scale standardized tests, such as Australia’s National Assessment Program - Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN), the intended benefits of which are increased accountability and improved educational outcomes. The NAPLAN purpose is…
Positional dependency in Murrinhpatha
Principles of morphotactics are a major source of morphological diversity amongst the world’s languages, and it is well-known that languages exhibit many different types of deviation from a canonical ideal in which there is a unique and consistent mapping between function and form. In this paper we present data from Murrinhpatha (non-Pama-Nyungan, northern Australia) that demonstrates a type of non-canonical morphotactics so far unattested in the…
Linguistics (24 obras) · Computer Science (20 obras) · Philosophy (20 obras) · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation (18 obras) · Linguistic Variation and Morphology (17 obras) · Multilingual Education and Policy (13 obras) · Natural language processing (10 obras) · Psychology (10 obras) · Philosophy (8 obras) · Language and cultural evolution (7 obras)