M Donohue
Biographic Data
| ID | 13345 |
|---|---|
| NAME | M Donohue |
| GIVEN NAMES | M |
| FAMILY NAME | Donohue |
| SIGNATURE | DONOHUE M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Australian National University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0957-3852 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 55 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 149 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 55 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1994 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Putting the Dark Emu debate into context
In this review of the Dark Emu debate we start out by summarising Bruce Pascoe's original work and Peter Sutton and Keryn Walshe's critique. However, the majority of this contribution is to place this Australian‐focussed debate into broader conceptual, methodological and evidential contexts generally associated with the investigation of early agriculture in other parts of the world. If we are to apply the term “agriculture” to Aboriginal plant ma…
The segmental inflection of Bumthang verbs
This paper presents a synoptic account of verbal suffixation in the Ura dialect of Bumthang, a language of central Bhutan. Examining verbal allomorphy shows the persistence of exceptions to historical sound changes in contemporary allophonic and allomorphic processes, and reveals striking contrasts with the culturally dominant Tibetic languages of the area. We examine the ways in which some of the allomorphy is motivated by patterns seen in the p…
Mapping the middle ground between foragers and farmers
The asymmetrical categories of negation in Bumthang
Less inflectional categories are found in negated clauses than are found in affirmative clauses in Bumthang, a Tibeto-Burman language of Bhutan. It is common cross-linguistically for languages to make fewer contrasts in negative clauses than in affirmative ones. In this paper we focus on the less expected appearance of the ergative case in certain negated irrealis clauses, where the use of this case would be ungrammatical in the corresponding aff…
Language and dialect relations in Bumthang
Thhis report presents basic wordlists from seven closely related East Bodish languages from Bumthang, northern Trongsa and far eastern Wangdue Phodrang districts in Bhutan. These wordlists are analysed, with lexico-statistical comparison to other languages of the region (East Bodish, Central Tibetan, and Indic), and preliminary notes on phonological processes and sound correspondences and change within the Bumthang varieties
Extended ergativity in Bumthang
This paper addresses ergativity in Bumthang. In 2016, Donohue & Donohue reported on the variable use of the ergative case marker in Bumthang transitive clauses. They identified a number of largely pragmatic, semantic, and informational structural contexts that license the use of the ergative case on the subjects. Given the nature of the factors involved we examined similar conditions for arguments of monovalent verbs, not a typical context for re…
Australia and New Guinea
The languages of Australia constitute a single genetic group. They are non-tonal, in that tone is not lexically contrastive in any Australian language, and they tend to have stress systems where the location of stress is largely determined by the edges of morphemes. Their intonation systems are not unlike those of some European languages, though with phonetic rather than phonological effects of post-focal compression for the most part. The large …
The Oxford Handbook of Language Prosody
This handbook presents detailed accounts of current research in all aspects of language prosody, with chapters written by leading experts from various disciplines. The last four decades have seen major theoretical and empirical breakthroughs in the field, many of them informed by interdisciplinary approaches, as reflected in this volume. Following an introductory chapter covering the fundamentals of language prosody research, Parts II and III exp…
Truth, person, and personal truth
In this paper we present data on the copula system of Kuke, a language of the lower Nubri valley, in northern Nepal. We present data showing that the system of copulas cannot easily be categorised in terms of the different descriptive categories that are frequently used in discussion of languages of the Himalayan region (evidentiality, egophoricity, conjunct/disjunct). Further, the different contrasts encoded in the morphologically simple copula …
Prosodic Contrasts and Segmental Analysis in Himalayan Languages
The connection between pitch, phonation and plosive voicing has been observed in many of the languages of the world, including those of the Himalayas. The paper examines different analyses of largely phonetically similar data from various Tibetan and Tamangic languages, comparing and evaluating the substantially different analyses offered in different descriptive traditions, arguing that principles of economy and descriptive adequacy allow us to …
Narrating Disaster through Participatory Research
This essay describes Narrating Disaster, a collaborative research project that the authors designed in response to Nepal's 2015 earthquakes in order to document survivors' nuanced and diverse experiences of living through a natural disaster. The time-sensitive research conducted in four highland valleys of Nepal (Mustang, Manang, Nubri, and Tsum) in a chaotic, post-catastrophe environment required the development of multi-layered participatory el…
On ergativity in Bumthang
This report investigates the uses of the ergative case marker in transitive clauses in Bumthang, a language of Central Bhutan. We discuss the conditions under which the ergative is required and show that a simple analysis involving multiple influences models the data. Previous studies have shown that variable case marking may be determined by syntactic, semantic, or pragmatic factors, but in Bumthang we see that all of these factors play a role i…
The Original Banana Split
Traditional starchy banana cultivation in the humid tropics is dominated by two widespread, but geographically discrete, groups of AAB cultivars: plantains in Africa and maoli-popo`ulu in the Pacific. Both AAB subgroups exhibit exceptionally high cultivar diversity due to multiple somatic mutations, and yet both subgroups have relatively similar genetic origins. Although both cultivar groups originated within a region defined by the Philippines, …
Some Principles on the Use of Macro-Areas in Typological Comparison
While the notion of the ‘area’ or ‘Sprachbund’ has a long history in linguistics, with geographically-defined regions frequently cited as a useful means to explain typological distributions, the problem of delimiting areas has not been well addressed. Lists of general-purpose, largely independent ‘macro-areas’ (typically continent size) have been proposed as a step to rule out contact as an explanation for various large-scale linguistic phenomena…
Negation and nominalization in Kusunda
Negative structures are generally assumed to be maximally accessible for verbal predicates, as evidenced by the requirement in many languages that nonverbal predicates be supported by a verb when negated. Indeed, the term ‘standard negation’ is used to refer to the negation of a declarative verbal clause, and yet this is at best highly restricted in Kusunda. We discuss the mood and nominalizing strategies that are employed to escape from the rest…
Who inherits what, when
There has been much discussion on the kinds of linguistic traits that can be borrowed, and under what circumstances, and the relationship of different kinds of contact to areality . This article suggests that phonological aberrancies, in terms of the family to which a language belongs, in the core phonology are indicative of an older substrate, while morphosyntactic aberrancies indicate superimposition. A case study of Australian phonological sys…
An Archaeological Review of Western New Guinea
New methodologies for historical linguistics
Recent research claims that analysis of lexical cognate classes for a basic wordlist can reproduce linguistic subgroups within the Austronesian family (Gray et al. 2009). The analysis is open to question in two respects. Primarily, the lexically-based classification, primed with pre-established cognate classes of the family it seeks to emulate, fails to differentiate shared retentions from shared innovations. Secondly, languages and language fami…
Consensus and the lexicon in historical linguistics
Preview this article: Consensus and the lexicon in historical linguistics: Rejoinder to “Basic vocabulary and Bayesian phylolinguistics”, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/dia.29.4.06don-1.gif
Typology and Areality
Analysis of typological features has received much attention in recent years. Despite claims that such analysis replicates the families and subgroups of families that are the product of work using the comparative method, there is strong evidence that the geographic distribution of typological features reflects socio-geographically relevant areas, rather than historically related subgroups. Further, different subsets of data can reveal different k…
Studying Contact without Detailed Studies of the Languages Involved
Studies of contact have revealed that all kinds of language material can, in the right circumstances, be borrowed from one language to another. Detecting, describing, and analyzing such situations typically involve the detailed study of at least two languages. An alternative involves detecting contact situations through database analysis. This cannot supplant the detailed work that requires detailed descriptive work in particular fields, but can …
Lapita and Proto-Oceanic
Linguistics and archaeology have been, and continue to be, entwined in the discourse on the early human history of the Pacific. It is commonly assumed, explicitly or otherwise, that the bearers of the Lapita culture were speakers of Proto-Oceanic, the ancestor of the Austronesian languages of most of the Pacific. In this discursive piece, the chronological data for the location and timing of the emergence of Lapita pottery are compared with the l…
Reconnecting Genes, Languages and Material Culture in Island Southeast Asia
The Holocene history of Island Southeast Asia (ISEA) is dominated by the 'Out-of-Taiwan' hypothesis and derivatives, such as the spread of the Island Southeast Asian Neolithic. According to these ideas, approximately 4500-4000 years ago, farmer-voyagers from Taiwan migrated southward into ISEA to subsequently acculturate, assimilate or displace pre-existing inhabitants. These processes are considered to have produced a consilience between human g…
Case and configurationality
Typological feature analysis models linguistic geography
Dunn and colleagues (2008) describe and exemplify the use of sophisticated analyses of abstract structural features to reconstruct language histories. The techniques that they use do show some clustering in the groups of languages that they examine; Dunn et al. state that they 'tend to favor a phylogenetic origin for the signal of relatedness' (p. 748), and that the results of their test case 'show a close degree of correspondence to the existing…
Farming and Language in Island Southeast Asia
Current portrayals of Island Southeast Asia (ISEA) over the past 5,000 years are dominated by discussion of the Austronesian "farming/language dispersal," with associated linguistic replacement, genetic clines, Neolithic "packages," and social transformations. The alternative framework that we present improves our understanding of the nature of the Austronesian language dispersal from Taiwan and better accords with the population genetics, archae…
The Oxford Handbook of Language Prosody
This handbook presents detailed accounts of current research in all aspects of language prosody, with chapters written by leading experts from various disciplines. The last four decades have seen major theoretical and empirical breakthroughs in the field, many of them informed by interdisciplinary approaches, as reflected in this volume. Following an introductory chapter covering the fundamentals of language prosody research, Parts II and III exp…
Pre‐Austronesian dispersal of banana cultivars West from New Guinea
Against the backdrop of a comprehensive archaeobotanical review, we present linguistic evidence that allows us to develop a model of the dispersal of bananas westwards from New Guinea. This westward dispersal is a window on pre‐Austronesian contact between New Guinea and regions to the west. The linguistically‐derived model is compatible with archaeobotanical and botanical data. Our interpretation accords with evidence for maritime interactions f…
Mapping the middle ground between foragers and farmers
Horticultural experimentation in northern Australia reconsidered
Did the banana, yam and taro arrive in Australia at the hands of Europeans or come across the Torres Strait 2000 years before? Reviewing the evidence from herbaria histories and anthropology, the authors propose a 'hierarchy of hypotheses' and consider a still earlier option, that these food plants were potentially grown in Australia at least 8000 years ago, while it was still joined to New Guinea. This hypothesis, first proposed by Jones and Mee…
Narrating Disaster through Participatory Research
This essay describes Narrating Disaster, a collaborative research project that the authors designed in response to Nepal's 2015 earthquakes in order to document survivors' nuanced and diverse experiences of living through a natural disaster. The time-sensitive research conducted in four highland valleys of Nepal (Mustang, Manang, Nubri, and Tsum) in a chaotic, post-catastrophe environment required the development of multi-layered participatory el…
Lapita and Proto-Oceanic
Linguistics and archaeology have been, and continue to be, entwined in the discourse on the early human history of the Pacific. It is commonly assumed, explicitly or otherwise, that the bearers of the Lapita culture were speakers of Proto-Oceanic, the ancestor of the Austronesian languages of most of the Pacific. In this discursive piece, the chronological data for the location and timing of the emergence of Lapita pottery are compared with the l…
Reconnecting Genes, Languages and Material Culture in Island Southeast Asia
The Holocene history of Island Southeast Asia (ISEA) is dominated by the 'Out-of-Taiwan' hypothesis and derivatives, such as the spread of the Island Southeast Asian Neolithic. According to these ideas, approximately 4500-4000 years ago, farmer-voyagers from Taiwan migrated southward into ISEA to subsequently acculturate, assimilate or displace pre-existing inhabitants. These processes are considered to have produced a consilience between human g…
Case and configurationality
Typological feature analysis models linguistic geography
Dunn and colleagues (2008) describe and exemplify the use of sophisticated analyses of abstract structural features to reconstruct language histories. The techniques that they use do show some clustering in the groups of languages that they examine; Dunn et al. state that they 'tend to favor a phylogenetic origin for the signal of relatedness' (p. 748), and that the results of their test case 'show a close degree of correspondence to the existing…
Ergativity
Recent work on ergative phenomena has been summarized in Dixon (1994), where in addition to listing and categorizing many aspects of ergativity across languages, he also makes several generalizations about ergative phenomena. Research on languages of Indonesia has turned up data in different languages that extends, refutes, or corroborates Dixon's claims concerning case marking, ergativity splits, split‐intransitivity, the primacy of morphologica…
An Archaeological Review of Western New Guinea
Bajau
Research on causative and applicative constructions has identified a class of symmetrical languages, in which either of two arguments may pattern like the direct object of a primary transitive verb. To date, symmetry of this sort has been identified only in a small geographically contiguous group of Bantu languages. Bajau, an Austronesian language of Indonesia and the Philippines, is shown to be symmetrical. Unlike the Bantu languages previously …
A note on verbal agreement in Maung∗
The non-Pama Nyungan languages of the north of Australia are notable for the often elaborate pronominal prefixing that is found on verbs. Most descriptions of this prefixing describe it as following a nominative-accusative pattern, and note that the ordering of the affixes is not fixed: sometimes object precedes subject, sometimes subject precedes object. In this article I demonstrate that the pronominal prefixing found in Maung is a split-ergati…
Tukang Besi
Tukang Besi is an archipelago in southeast Sulawesi, Indonesia, where an Austronesian language is spoken. The speech represented here is that of the north-west coast of the island of Wanci. With mainly slight lexical variation it represents the speech of the two northernmost islands in the archipelago, Wanci and Kaledupa
Tukang Besi
Tukang Besi is an archipelago in southeast Sulawesi, Indonesia, where an Austronesian language is spoken. The speech represented here is that of the north-west coast of the island of Wanci. With mainly slight lexical variation it represents the speech of the two northernmost islands in the archipelago, Wanci and Kaledupa
Split Intransitivity in Tukang Besi
The Tukang Besi language has consistent nominative-accusative morphology on its verbs, yet syntactic processes show that we need to recognize a split in the intransitive verbs. The split is roughly along the lines of agentive/controlled versus nonagentive/noncontrolled, a division that has been used to characterize unergative and unaccusative verbs in some languages. Five grammatical tests are presented that demonstrate the different subclasses o…
Bajau
Research on causative and applicative constructions has identified a class of symmetrical languages, in which either of two arguments may pattern like the direct object of a primary transitive verb. To date, symmetry of this sort has been identified only in a small geographically contiguous group of Bantu languages. Bajau, an Austronesian language of Indonesia and the Philippines, is shown to be symmetrical. Unlike the Bantu languages previously …
What's Happened to Us? Some Developments in the Malay Pronoun System
We examine the development of the Austronesian first-person pronouns in nonstandard varieties of Malay/Indonesian. The fact that of the inclusive and exclusive pronouns only the form of the inclusive, * kita?, is ever retained in the nonsingular forms when the inclusive-exclusive distinction is lost, or extended to a singular meaning, is taken as a sign of an oppositional relationship being retained even after the functional basis for that opposi…
Transitivity in Tukang Besi
The Tukang Besi language does not appear to display a clear distinction between transitive and intransitive clauses, as transitive verbs are freely able to appear without any overt object and degrees of intransitivity are to be found in the language. The ground between transitive and intransitive contains several points of interest in that eight different degrees of transitivity can be morphologically defined in the one language, allowing us to t…
A note on verbal agreement in Maung∗
The non-Pama Nyungan languages of the north of Australia are notable for the often elaborate pronominal prefixing that is found on verbs. Most descriptions of this prefixing describe it as following a nominative-accusative pattern, and note that the ordering of the affixes is not fixed: sometimes object precedes subject, sometimes subject precedes object. In this article I demonstrate that the pronominal prefixing found in Maung is a split-ergati…
Muna-English Distionary
Irregularity and Pronominal Markedness
Ergativity
Recent work on ergative phenomena has been summarized in Dixon (1994), where in addition to listing and categorizing many aspects of ergativity across languages, he also makes several generalizations about ergative phenomena. Research on languages of Indonesia has turned up data in different languages that extends, refutes, or corroborates Dixon's claims concerning case marking, ergativity splits, split‐intransitivity, the primacy of morphologica…
Pronouns and Gender
Pronouns and Gender:Exploring Nominal Classification Systems in Northern New Guinea Mark Donohue Abstract This article is intended not as an overview of the range of nominal classification systems that can be found in the northern part of West Papua, but as a discussion of a typologically rare development of classification that is found in some languages of this quarter of New Guinea. This discursion is set in a brief discussion of some of the mo…
A Grammar of Tukang Besi
Split Intransitivity and Saweru
Split Intransitivity and Saweru Mark Donohue Abstract The phenomenon of split intransitivity is discussed in a variety of languages, emphasizing the contrast between two-way and three-way split intransitivity. The agreement system of Saweru, a Papuan language of West Papua, is examined, and there follows a discussion of where Saweru fits into a typology of split intransitivity. 1. Intransitivity Splits and Alignment. The simple, yet effective, di…
Coding choices in argument structure
The syntactic properties of applicatives have received a large amount of attention. Despite this there have been almost no attempts to explain the reasons behind the choice of an applicative coding of an argument when there is an grammatical oblique coding strategy available. This study focuses on dynamic applicative constructions in Tukang Besi, an Austronesian language of central Indonesia, and examines a large corpus for reasons why applicativ…
Which Sounds Change
Which Sounds Change:Descent and Borrowing in the Skou Family1 Mark Donohue Abstract The process of establishing genetic relationships in the endeavor of historical linguistics is complicated by the fact that some, if not most, languages show no inclination to "behave themselves" by reflecting only material inherited from their protolanguage. Borrowing at many levels is rife in many languages, particularly when geographic separation is slight, and…
Morphological Templates, Headedness, and Applicatives in Barupu
Agreement in the Skou Language
Skou, a language of the central north coast of New Guinea, presents a rare example of multiple exponence of features in the agreement paradigms for subject. While this is a challenge for theories of morphology, because each morphological realization presents exactly the same featural information in Skou, there is a simple historical explanation for the modern complexities, involving cycles of cliticization. After the initial impetus toward develo…
The Laryngeal Gesture in Austronesian Languages
Hajek and Bowden (Oceanic Linguistics 41:222-224) report on the unusual ejective series in Waimoa, an Austronesian language of East Timor. I argue that, while phonetically odd, it is not a phonological oddity to find ejectives in an Austronesian language, especially not one in the Timor region. A possible historical pathway for the genesis of the ejectives is proposed, and some questions are raised about the acoustic nature of ejectives and about…
A Grammar of Hatam, Bird's Head Peninsula, Irian Jaya
The area of the Hatam in the eastern Bird's Head in relation to the Cenderawasih Bay Map 2 Approximate locations of Hatam dialects 1 2 Phonology 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 2.9 2.10 4.1.1Possessives 80 4.1.2Adjectives 82 4.1.3Quantification 82 4.1.4Determiners 83 4.2 Non-verbal predications 84 4.3 Impersonal predicates 86 4.4 Clause constituents 87 4.4.1 Temporal adverbials 87 4.4.2Subject 87 4.4.3Object 4.4.4BeneficiarylRecipient = bak-c…
Voice Opposition Without Voice Morphology
The bulk of this paper deals with an analysis of the voice system of Tukang Besi, which, has both a complex verbal agreement system as well as the last fully developed (and obligatory) case marking system among Austronesian languages with an increasingly head-marking trend to the east (case marking of core constituents only becomes functional again in Vanuatu and the Solomons, and is well-developed in Polynesia). For that reason, as well as perso…
Configurationality in the Languages of New Guinea* * I wish to acknowledge the contributions of many conversations with Bill Foley and Jane Simpson about matters discussed in the following article, ma…
This article argues that phrase structure configurations play a more significant role in the organization of the syntax of many Papuan languages than has hitherto been acknowledged. Much of what has been described in the literature as ‘(free) variation’ in the order of constituents (and treated in the same spirit of the analysis of free nominals versus bound pronominals by Jelinek and Demers 1994 Jelinek, E and Demers, RA. 1994. ‘Predicates and p…
Numerals and their Position in Universal Grammar
One of Greenberg’s claims concerning the appearance of numerals as modifiers concerns the order of the elements, suggesting that post-nominal numerals are “favored in indefinite and approximate constructions”. Examining a small but representative body of data from a variety of languages, and one of the common grammaticalisation targets of singular numerals, the indefinite article, we conclude that the generalisation does not have a universal stat…
Argument Structure and Adjuncts
Negative Grammatical Functions in Skou
Negation is known to correlate with changes of word order, agreement, or case marking in the clause. I present data from Skou, a language of north-central New Guinea, which show obliques and adjuncts appearing postverbally in the SOV positive clause and preverbally in negative clauses. Moreover, in addition to these changes in the order of constituents, the grammatical functions assigned in the negated clause are not the same as in a positive cla…
Classification and Human Language
for animals are supposed, ideally at least, to motivate the framing of the zoo as a particular kind of space (though commercial interests have ways of subverting or by-passing such principles). The guide notes and explanations attempt to position the viewer as this concerned, responsible and democratic subject. It is reasonable to claim then that in diffusing particular kinds of knowledges and in forming subjects for such knowledges, collections …
Complex predicates and bipartite stems in Skou
I examine a range of complex predicates, searching for ones that might be called ‘bipartite stems’ in Skou, a language of New Guinea. First I draw a tentative distinction between serial verb constructions and N+V predicates on the one hand, and ‘true’ bipartite stems on the other, while pointing out some complications involved in making this division. Following this I examine the range of stems that can possibly be called ‘bipartite stems’, and t…
Linguistics (45 works) · Philosophy (39 works) · Linguistic Variation and Morphology (31 works) · History (29 works) · Computer Science (26 works) · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation (23 works) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (18 works) · Geography (16 works) · Mathematics (13 works) · Archaeology (12 works)