Lesley Stirling
Biographic Data
| ID | 1058837 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Lesley Stirling |
| GIVEN NAMES | Lesley |
| FAMILY NAME | Stirling |
| SIGNATURE | STIRLING L |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Melbourne |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3730-6463 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 70 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 23 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Serial rorters or mere mortals?” Gendered mediation in comments to newspapers about how male and femalegovernment leaders handle money
This article examines the acceptability of female government leaders to members of the public through online reader comments to newspapers, focusing on the differing appraisal of male and female leaders’ relationship to money/finance. We examined 20,000 reader comments to two national Australian newspapers about 13 male and 14 female government leaders between 2013 and 2018, employing corpus-assisted discourse analysis. Dissatisfaction with handl…
A conversation analytic approach to schizophrenic interaction
Certain schools of phenomenological psychiatry conceive of schizophrenia as a pathology of common-sense. Ethnomethodological enquiry, with its roots in Schutzian social phenomenology, takes as its domain, topic, and substance of study the ongoing achievement of a common-sense world between social members. Yet, dialogue between psychiatry and ethnomethodological approaches is thin. In this article, we discuss a conversation analytic approach to sc…
Towards an interactional grammar of interjections
Words classified as 'interjections' tend to be treated in descriptive grammars as outside of morphosyntax, too contextually bound to warrant a systematic description of their syntagmatic relations. We use a comparative corpus of conversations in four typologically distinct Australian Aboriginal languages (Garrwa, Gija, Jaru and Murrinhpatha) to illustrate how such an analysis may be developed. We focus on forms which have been described as 'compa…
On the road again
In this article we examine displays of epistemic status and stance among long-term Anglo-Australian residents of remote communities through a case study of a 2-h interaction by four men who have demonstrated sophisticated knowledge of locations in their region. We show how equal access to knowledge of places is oriented to, as well as how differences in rights to authoritatively claim knowledge emerge in disputes over details of locations which a…
The epistemics of social relations in Murrinhpatha, Garrwa and Jaru conversations
Locational pointing in Murrinhpatha, Gija, and English conversations
It has been suggested that the gestural accuracy used by speakers of Australian Aboriginal languages like Guugu Yimidhirr and Arrernte to indicate directions and represent topographic features is a consequence of absolute frame of reference being dominant in these languages; and that the lackadaisical points produced by North American English speakers is an outcome of relative frame being dominant in English. We test this claim by comparing locat…
Positioning Selves in Narrative Accounts of Military Trauma
Linguistic and narrative strategies employed in two dyadic interviews of male veterans of the war in Afghanistan were analysed and compared. Each interviewee told chains of connected stories that positioned them in relation to catastrophic events and their effects. These incidents were framed as being linked to decisions that the teller had taken in perilous circumstances. Sequences of generic clauses in sections of orientation were used to manag…
Tools of Engagement
Building on earlier Conversation Analytic work on turn-taking and response mobilization, we use video-recorded multiparty conversations to consider in detail how Australian Aboriginal participants in conversation select a next speaker in turns that are grammatically designed as questions. We focus in particular on the role of a range of embodied behaviors, such as gaze direction, body orientation, and pointing, to select—or avoid selecting—a next…
The preposition at from a spatial language, cognition, and information systems perspective
While both linguistic semantics and geographic information science have struggled to accurately and usefully define the meanings of natural language prepositions, there has been less dialogue between these disciplines than one might expect. In this paper we set out to describe the meaning of the English preposition at using well-established formal models of qualitative spatial relations within geographic information science (GIScience), ultimatel…
The past is a foreign country
Memory and time are the two fundamental components of personal experience narrative. For a sole narrator with no competing claims for reliability, time distance from the narrated events is more or less irrelevant, and storytelling can proceed smoothly. However, what happens when more than one participant seems to have an equal claim to telling rights? We report a detailed micro-analysis of co-narrated stories of two brothers’ experiences as refug…
Narrative in ‘societies of intimates’
When the Australian writer Richard Flanagan accepted the 2014 Man Booker Prize for fiction, he said that “As a species it is story that distinguishes us”. While the prize was given for a literary work written in English, Australia and the surrounding regions are replete with a rich diversity of oral traditions, and with stories remembered and told over countless generations and in many languages. In this article we consider both the universality …
What the hell was in that wine?”
We consider a corpus of conversational narratives which arise in the complex, multiparty setting of pre- and post-game stretching sessions of a women’s elite basketball team. Our focus is on the characteristics of story openings within this corpus, and we consider how stories are launched; how roles of story opener and teller are distributed within the group, reflecting both entitlement to tell stories and social relationships between the partici…
Universals of Split Argument Coding and Morphological Neutralization
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…
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 resou…
Tense, Aspect, Modality and Evidentiality in Australian Languages
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 Verstr
About you
"Double reference" in Kala Lagaw Ya narratives
The label “double reference” is introduced to describe clauses which incorporate reference to the same participant in the same grammatical function via use of two distinct nominal expressions. This paper investigates the discourse-referential function of double reference in narratives in Kala Lagaw Ya, the language of the Western Islands of the Torres Strait. A distributional analysis of the reference tracking options used in the stories is repor…
The Absent Breast
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 di…
Discourse Structure, Grounding, and Prosody in Task-Oriented Dialogue
This article explores the relationship between discourse structure, grounding, and prosody in interactive discourse through an empirical analysis of task-oriented dialogue (the Australian Map Task corpus). We investigate how patterns of prosodic boundary strengths, pitch contour, pausing, and overlap relate to the structuring of "common ground units" (Nakatani & Traum, 1999), collaborative units that capture the points in the discourse at which c…
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%) correspo…
The Multifunctionality of Anaphoric Expressions
This paper begins by surveying data from discourse analytic and psycholinguistic studies of a wide range of languages which offer support for the hypothesis that anaphoric expressions may function to indicate discourse boundaries in addition to having a reference tracking role. Thus the structure of the discourse is inherently important in considering the functioning of anaphoric systems. Fox's principle of morphosyntactic markedness is invoked t…
Editors' Preface
The Multifunctionality of Anaphoric Expressions
This paper begins by surveying data from discourse analytic and psycholinguistic studies of a wide range of languages which offer support for the hypothesis that anaphoric expressions may function to indicate discourse boundaries in addition to having a reference tracking role. Thus the structure of the discourse is inherently important in considering the functioning of anaphoric systems. Fox's principle of morphosyntactic markedness is invoked t…
The epistemics of social relations in Murrinhpatha, Garrwa and Jaru conversations
About you
The Absent Breast
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 di…
Tools of Engagement
Building on earlier Conversation Analytic work on turn-taking and response mobilization, we use video-recorded multiparty conversations to consider in detail how Australian Aboriginal participants in conversation select a next speaker in turns that are grammatically designed as questions. We focus in particular on the role of a range of embodied behaviors, such as gaze direction, body orientation, and pointing, to select—or avoid selecting—a next…
On the road again
In this article we examine displays of epistemic status and stance among long-term Anglo-Australian residents of remote communities through a case study of a 2-h interaction by four men who have demonstrated sophisticated knowledge of locations in their region. We show how equal access to knowledge of places is oriented to, as well as how differences in rights to authoritatively claim knowledge emerge in disputes over details of locations which a…
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%) correspo…
Towards an interactional grammar of interjections
Words classified as 'interjections' tend to be treated in descriptive grammars as outside of morphosyntax, too contextually bound to warrant a systematic description of their syntagmatic relations. We use a comparative corpus of conversations in four typologically distinct Australian Aboriginal languages (Garrwa, Gija, Jaru and Murrinhpatha) to illustrate how such an analysis may be developed. We focus on forms which have been described as 'compa…
Discourse Structure, Grounding, and Prosody in Task-Oriented Dialogue
This article explores the relationship between discourse structure, grounding, and prosody in interactive discourse through an empirical analysis of task-oriented dialogue (the Australian Map Task corpus). We investigate how patterns of prosodic boundary strengths, pitch contour, pausing, and overlap relate to the structuring of "common ground units" (Nakatani & Traum, 1999), collaborative units that capture the points in the discourse at which c…
Locational pointing in Murrinhpatha, Gija, and English conversations
It has been suggested that the gestural accuracy used by speakers of Australian Aboriginal languages like Guugu Yimidhirr and Arrernte to indicate directions and represent topographic features is a consequence of absolute frame of reference being dominant in these languages; and that the lackadaisical points produced by North American English speakers is an outcome of relative frame being dominant in English. We test this claim by comparing locat…
What the hell was in that wine?”
We consider a corpus of conversational narratives which arise in the complex, multiparty setting of pre- and post-game stretching sessions of a women’s elite basketball team. Our focus is on the characteristics of story openings within this corpus, and we consider how stories are launched; how roles of story opener and teller are distributed within the group, reflecting both entitlement to tell stories and social relationships between the partici…
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 resou…
Tense, Aspect, Modality and Evidentiality in Australian Languages
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 Verstr
The Multifunctionality of Anaphoric Expressions
This paper begins by surveying data from discourse analytic and psycholinguistic studies of a wide range of languages which offer support for the hypothesis that anaphoric expressions may function to indicate discourse boundaries in addition to having a reference tracking role. Thus the structure of the discourse is inherently important in considering the functioning of anaphoric systems. Fox's principle of morphosyntactic markedness is invoked t…
Editors' Preface
The Multifunctionality of Anaphoric Expressions
This paper begins by surveying data from discourse analytic and psycholinguistic studies of a wide range of languages which offer support for the hypothesis that anaphoric expressions may function to indicate discourse boundaries in addition to having a reference tracking role. Thus the structure of the discourse is inherently important in considering the functioning of anaphoric systems. Fox's principle of morphosyntactic markedness is invoked t…
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%) correspo…
Discourse Structure, Grounding, and Prosody in Task-Oriented Dialogue
This article explores the relationship between discourse structure, grounding, and prosody in interactive discourse through an empirical analysis of task-oriented dialogue (the Australian Map Task corpus). We investigate how patterns of prosodic boundary strengths, pitch contour, pausing, and overlap relate to the structuring of "common ground units" (Nakatani & Traum, 1999), collaborative units that capture the points in the discourse at which c…
The Absent Breast
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 di…
"Double reference" in Kala Lagaw Ya narratives
The label “double reference” is introduced to describe clauses which incorporate reference to the same participant in the same grammatical function via use of two distinct nominal expressions. This paper investigates the discourse-referential function of double reference in narratives in Kala Lagaw Ya, the language of the Western Islands of the Torres Strait. A distributional analysis of the reference tracking options used in the stories is repor…
About you
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 resou…
Tense, Aspect, Modality and Evidentiality in Australian Languages
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 Verstr
Universals of Split Argument Coding and Morphological Neutralization
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…
Narrative in ‘societies of intimates’
When the Australian writer Richard Flanagan accepted the 2014 Man Booker Prize for fiction, he said that “As a species it is story that distinguishes us”. While the prize was given for a literary work written in English, Australia and the surrounding regions are replete with a rich diversity of oral traditions, and with stories remembered and told over countless generations and in many languages. In this article we consider both the universality …
What the hell was in that wine?”
We consider a corpus of conversational narratives which arise in the complex, multiparty setting of pre- and post-game stretching sessions of a women’s elite basketball team. Our focus is on the characteristics of story openings within this corpus, and we consider how stories are launched; how roles of story opener and teller are distributed within the group, reflecting both entitlement to tell stories and social relationships between the partici…
The preposition at from a spatial language, cognition, and information systems perspective
While both linguistic semantics and geographic information science have struggled to accurately and usefully define the meanings of natural language prepositions, there has been less dialogue between these disciplines than one might expect. In this paper we set out to describe the meaning of the English preposition at using well-established formal models of qualitative spatial relations within geographic information science (GIScience), ultimatel…
The past is a foreign country
Memory and time are the two fundamental components of personal experience narrative. For a sole narrator with no competing claims for reliability, time distance from the narrated events is more or less irrelevant, and storytelling can proceed smoothly. However, what happens when more than one participant seems to have an equal claim to telling rights? We report a detailed micro-analysis of co-narrated stories of two brothers’ experiences as refug…
Tools of Engagement
Building on earlier Conversation Analytic work on turn-taking and response mobilization, we use video-recorded multiparty conversations to consider in detail how Australian Aboriginal participants in conversation select a next speaker in turns that are grammatically designed as questions. We focus in particular on the role of a range of embodied behaviors, such as gaze direction, body orientation, and pointing, to select—or avoid selecting—a next…
Positioning Selves in Narrative Accounts of Military Trauma
Linguistic and narrative strategies employed in two dyadic interviews of male veterans of the war in Afghanistan were analysed and compared. Each interviewee told chains of connected stories that positioned them in relation to catastrophic events and their effects. These incidents were framed as being linked to decisions that the teller had taken in perilous circumstances. Sequences of generic clauses in sections of orientation were used to manag…
Locational pointing in Murrinhpatha, Gija, and English conversations
It has been suggested that the gestural accuracy used by speakers of Australian Aboriginal languages like Guugu Yimidhirr and Arrernte to indicate directions and represent topographic features is a consequence of absolute frame of reference being dominant in these languages; and that the lackadaisical points produced by North American English speakers is an outcome of relative frame being dominant in English. We test this claim by comparing locat…
On the road again
In this article we examine displays of epistemic status and stance among long-term Anglo-Australian residents of remote communities through a case study of a 2-h interaction by four men who have demonstrated sophisticated knowledge of locations in their region. We show how equal access to knowledge of places is oriented to, as well as how differences in rights to authoritatively claim knowledge emerge in disputes over details of locations which a…
The epistemics of social relations in Murrinhpatha, Garrwa and Jaru conversations
A conversation analytic approach to schizophrenic interaction
Certain schools of phenomenological psychiatry conceive of schizophrenia as a pathology of common-sense. Ethnomethodological enquiry, with its roots in Schutzian social phenomenology, takes as its domain, topic, and substance of study the ongoing achievement of a common-sense world between social members. Yet, dialogue between psychiatry and ethnomethodological approaches is thin. In this article, we discuss a conversation analytic approach to sc…
Towards an interactional grammar of interjections
Words classified as 'interjections' tend to be treated in descriptive grammars as outside of morphosyntax, too contextually bound to warrant a systematic description of their syntagmatic relations. We use a comparative corpus of conversations in four typologically distinct Australian Aboriginal languages (Garrwa, Gija, Jaru and Murrinhpatha) to illustrate how such an analysis may be developed. We focus on forms which have been described as 'compa…
Serial rorters or mere mortals?” Gendered mediation in comments to newspapers about how male and femalegovernment leaders handle money
This article examines the acceptability of female government leaders to members of the public through online reader comments to newspapers, focusing on the differing appraisal of male and female leaders’ relationship to money/finance. We examined 20,000 reader comments to two national Australian newspapers about 13 male and 14 female government leaders between 2013 and 2018, employing corpus-assisted discourse analysis. Dissatisfaction with handl…
Linguistics (19 works) · Computer Science (15 works) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (15 works) · Philosophy (14 works) · Philosophy (13 works) · Psychology (13 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition (11 works) · History (9 works) · History (7 works)