Myfany Turpin
Biographic Data
| ID | 3638368 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Myfany Turpin |
| GIVEN NAMES | Myfany |
| FAMILY NAME | Turpin |
| SIGNATURE | TURPIN M |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Sydney |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0395-6756 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 42 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Ecomusicology, performance and environmental crises: Nurturing human relationships with the environment
This introductory article to the special issue overviews central themes of the field of Ecomusicology as drawn out from the discussions of Indigenous Australian and Aoetearoa New Zealand music and dance performance and/or sound and movement practices as considered with relation to their environments. We discuss how these practices are holistic multimodal art forms, emphasise the importance of deep listening and discuss the role of collective memo…
Ceremony and sentient ecology
Many cultures use songs to influence the world around them (e.g. Levin 2006, Feld 1982). In Australian Aboriginal societies, song can be a tool to influence one’s environment. Such practices can affect the physical world—people, animals, plants— and the non-physical world, where spirit beings reside, a realm referred to as the Altyerre in Arandic languages of central Australia (Dobson 2007, Turner 2010, Wallace & Lovell 2009, Green 2012). Like th…
The Kaytetye segmental inventory
There are three phonological hypotheses on the Kaytetye segmental inventory. Hypothesis 1 proposes 30 segments: four monophthongs, one diphthong and 25 consonants. Hypothesis 2 proposes 54 segments: two monophthongs and 52 consonants. Hypothesis 3 proposes 55 segments: three monophthongs and 52 consonants. The choice between these three hypotheses has significant implications for models of phonological contrast, phonotactic organization, syllable…
Text-setting in Kaytetye
Singing is a universal human activity. Across the vast range of song traditions throughout the world, native speakers have consistent intuitions about how the syllables in a given line of song text should be set to the tunes and/or rhythms within their various song traditions. This paper presents an Optimality Theoretic analysis of text-setting in a set of ceremonial songs traditionally sung and passed on orally by groups of Kaytetye-speaking wom…
Puranguwana’ (‘Perishing in the Sun’) as sung by Patrick Jupiter Smith, Jack Gordon and Marie Gordon
Across Aboriginal Australia, Aboriginal songs are often attributed to the spirit world rather than as compositions by the living. Deceased ancestors give songs to people and such a recipient is described as the finder of a song. This is particularly evident in 'Puranguwana' ('Perishing in the Sun'), a song of the public ceremonial genre known by older men and women at Balgo and Bililuna communities in the south-east Kimberley in Western Australia…
Wanji-wanji: The Past and Future of an Aboriginal Travelling Song
Classical Aboriginal culture in Australia consists of many different kinds of ceremonies, including travelling ceremonies that are often shared across linguistic and geographical boundaries. Each of these ceremonies is made up of dozens of different verses. Perhaps the most widely known travelling ceremony is one referred to in some areas as ‘Wanji-wanji’. This was known over half the country and dates back at least 170 years, as evidenced in ele…
Central Australian Aboriginal Songs and Biocultural Knowledge: Evidence from Women's Ceremonies Relating to Edible Seeds
Songs encode rich knowledge of the social and ecological worlds of Aboriginal people living in the arid interior of the Australian continent, a desert with one of the most variable rainfalls in the world. People have shaped the ecology of this region in continuous feedback loops over many generations such that there is nowadays a complex system of interdependence between cultural practices and the local ecosystems. Singing traditions are an integ…
An Aboriginal Women’s Song from Arrwek, Central Australia
Songs are a fundamental part of Indigenous Australian cultures. They are vehicles for transmitting experiences about a region, including the stories and ancestral entities from the creation. Yet relatively little is known about the musical characteristics of songs from many parts of Australia. In this article we present the first musical analysis of traditional songs of the Anmatyerr people of central Australia. We analyse a selection of songs fr…
Edible Insect Larvae in Kaytetye: Their Nomenclature and Significance
Insects have traditionally constituted an important source of food in many cultures, but changes in dietary practices and other lifestyle traits are threatening the transmission of insect-related knowledge and vocabulary to younger generations of Indigenous Australians. This paper describes the rich cultural and culinary traditions surrounding an important insect group, namely a class of edible insect larvae consumed by a desert community in cent…
Brilliance as Cognitive Complexity in Aboriginal Australia
Writers on Australian Aboriginal ceremonial practices and contemporary commercial art have identified properties that can be described as producing 'brilliance', the term used by Howard Morphy (1989) for Yolngu visual art. Brilliance involves the emotionally charged knowledge that Ancestral power is manifest. We suggest that, in Australian Aboriginal ceremonial practices and art, two kinds of brilliance are at work, both of which we exemplify usi…
Contrastive and Non-contrastive Pre-stopping in Kaytetye
Kaytetye is one of the few Australian languages for which pre-stopping is contrastive for nasals. This paper provides the first quantitative data on the phonetic realization of contrastive pre-stopping for any Australian language. It also provides data on the hitherto unreported non-contrastive pre-stopping of laterals in Kaytetye. The findings demonstrate that contrastive nasal pre-stopping and non-contrastive lateral pre-stopping differ on thre…
The Importance of Insects in Australian Aboriginal Society: A Dictionary Survey
Insects and their products have long been used in Indigenous Australian societies as food, medicine and construction material, and given prominent roles in myths, traditional songs and ceremonies. However, much of the available information on the uses of insects in Australia remains anecdotal. In this essay, we review published dictionaries of Aboriginal languages spoken in many parts of Australia, to provide an overview of the Indigenous names a…
Language description informed by theory
This volume explores how linguistic theories inform the ways in which languages are described. Theories, as representations of linguistic categories, guide the field linguist to look for various phenomena without presupposing their necessary existence and provide the tools to account for various sets of data across different languages. A goal of linguistic description is to represent the full range of language structures for any given language. T…
The Spotted Nightjar Calls When Dingo Pups Are Born: Ecological and Social Indicators In Central Australia
Across cultures there are known signs that signal the availability of certain foods, predict the weather or warn people of impending events. In Central Australia the call of the spotted nightjar (Eurostopodus argus) signals the time when dingo pups are born. This article identifies indicator events known by speakers of the Arandic languages in Central Australia. Indicator events can be described as the presence or behavior of a particular species…
Edge Effects in Warlpiri Yawulyu Songs: Resyllabification, Epenthesis, Final Vowel Modification
Song genres vary as to which aspects of language and music are matched to create a well-formed song. For example, English folk songs match stressed syllables to strong musical beats. Some song styles have no requirements on how language and music should align. This article analyses how text and music align in Warlpiri women's songs from central Australia and finds there are ‘text-setting’ rules for setting text to musical rhythm. We first identif…
Semantic Extension in Kaytetye Flora and Fauna Terms
Flora and fauna play a vital role in Indigenous cultures and their nomenclature reveals much about the society from which they belong. This article identifies the lexical structures and types of metaphor and metonymy that are used for naming plants and animals in Kaytetye, a language of central Australia. By linking semantic analysis to detailed ethnography this paper elucidates the cultural connections that underlie polysemous biota terms. Vario…
Sustaining Women's Yawulyu/Awelye: Some Practitioners' and Learners' Perspectives
In 2010 the authors visited various Central Australian communities, including Willowra, Tennant Creek, Alekarenge, Barrow Creek and Ti Tree, to interview some of our research collaborators past and present about how they saw the present and future of their yawulyu/awelye traditions. Yawulyu (in Warlpiri and Warumungu) and Awelye (in Kaytetye and other Arandic languages) are cognate names for women's country-based rituals, including songs, dancing…
If You Go Down to the Soak Today: Symbolism and Structure in an Arandic Children's Story
In an Aboriginal children's story from Central Australia, small creatures such as dragon lizards and ground-dwelling insect larvae known as ant lions convey rich symbolic meanings. This article analyzes the story, song, and graphic schema of a story that reinforces the dangers of being alone and the unpredictable incarnations of malevolent characters. By comparing versions in several Arandic languages, we elucidate the network of social and cultu…
The Language of Song: Some Recent Approaches in Description and Analysis
Singing is an activity that happens in every society. But the ways that texts and music align with each other and the ways meanings are conveyed, and how the activity fits into larger contexts vary considerably from society to society. The study of song draws in not only the discipline of musicology but also many fields of linguistic inquiry*phonology, poetics, morphology, semantics and pragmatics. Like words and morphemes, songs are form-meaning…
The language of Central Australian Aboriginal songs
The language of Central Australian Aboriginal songs differs markedly from everyday speech. Early research on Aboriginal song texts suggested that the differences between speech and song were insurmountable. In 1886 F.J. Gillen, the postmaster at Alice Springs who was familiar with the Arrernte language, stated:‘What about the words’ etc, I have never yet been able to find out the meaning of any of their Arunta chants and I am doubtful whether the…
Artfully hidden: Text and rhythm in a central Australian aboriginal song series
Traditional songs from Central Australia have a text set to an unvarying rhythm, which is in contrast to songs from many other parts of Australia. This has led many researchers to regard text and rhythm of Central Australian Aboriginal songs as 'two facets of the same structure'. In creating this structure the question is whether the setting of text to rhythm is random and thus non-metrical, or whether it is based on regular alignment of textual …
Body part terms in Kaytetye feeling expressions
This paper addresses the question of how feelings are expressed in Kaytetye, a Central Australian language of the Pama-Nyugan family. It identifies three different formal constructions for expressing feelings, and explores the extent to which specific body part terms are associated with types of feelings, based on linguistic evidence in the form of lexical compounds, collocations and the way people talk about feelings. It is suggested that partic…
Sustaining Women's Yawulyu/Awelye: Some Practitioners' and Learners' Perspectives
In 2010 the authors visited various Central Australian communities, including Willowra, Tennant Creek, Alekarenge, Barrow Creek and Ti Tree, to interview some of our research collaborators past and present about how they saw the present and future of their yawulyu/awelye traditions. Yawulyu (in Warlpiri and Warumungu) and Awelye (in Kaytetye and other Arandic languages) are cognate names for women's country-based rituals, including songs, dancing…
The Importance of Insects in Australian Aboriginal Society: A Dictionary Survey
Insects and their products have long been used in Indigenous Australian societies as food, medicine and construction material, and given prominent roles in myths, traditional songs and ceremonies. However, much of the available information on the uses of insects in Australia remains anecdotal. In this essay, we review published dictionaries of Aboriginal languages spoken in many parts of Australia, to provide an overview of the Indigenous names a…
Edge Effects in Warlpiri Yawulyu Songs: Resyllabification, Epenthesis, Final Vowel Modification
Song genres vary as to which aspects of language and music are matched to create a well-formed song. For example, English folk songs match stressed syllables to strong musical beats. Some song styles have no requirements on how language and music should align. This article analyses how text and music align in Warlpiri women's songs from central Australia and finds there are ‘text-setting’ rules for setting text to musical rhythm. We first identif…
The Language of Song: Some Recent Approaches in Description and Analysis
Singing is an activity that happens in every society. But the ways that texts and music align with each other and the ways meanings are conveyed, and how the activity fits into larger contexts vary considerably from society to society. The study of song draws in not only the discipline of musicology but also many fields of linguistic inquiry*phonology, poetics, morphology, semantics and pragmatics. Like words and morphemes, songs are form-meaning…
Artfully hidden: Text and rhythm in a central Australian aboriginal song series
Traditional songs from Central Australia have a text set to an unvarying rhythm, which is in contrast to songs from many other parts of Australia. This has led many researchers to regard text and rhythm of Central Australian Aboriginal songs as 'two facets of the same structure'. In creating this structure the question is whether the setting of text to rhythm is random and thus non-metrical, or whether it is based on regular alignment of textual …
Contrastive and Non-contrastive Pre-stopping in Kaytetye
Kaytetye is one of the few Australian languages for which pre-stopping is contrastive for nasals. This paper provides the first quantitative data on the phonetic realization of contrastive pre-stopping for any Australian language. It also provides data on the hitherto unreported non-contrastive pre-stopping of laterals in Kaytetye. The findings demonstrate that contrastive nasal pre-stopping and non-contrastive lateral pre-stopping differ on thre…
Semantic Extension in Kaytetye Flora and Fauna Terms
Flora and fauna play a vital role in Indigenous cultures and their nomenclature reveals much about the society from which they belong. This article identifies the lexical structures and types of metaphor and metonymy that are used for naming plants and animals in Kaytetye, a language of central Australia. By linking semantic analysis to detailed ethnography this paper elucidates the cultural connections that underlie polysemous biota terms. Vario…
If You Go Down to the Soak Today: Symbolism and Structure in an Arandic Children's Story
In an Aboriginal children's story from Central Australia, small creatures such as dragon lizards and ground-dwelling insect larvae known as ant lions convey rich symbolic meanings. This article analyzes the story, song, and graphic schema of a story that reinforces the dangers of being alone and the unpredictable incarnations of malevolent characters. By comparing versions in several Arandic languages, we elucidate the network of social and cultu…
The Kaytetye segmental inventory
There are three phonological hypotheses on the Kaytetye segmental inventory. Hypothesis 1 proposes 30 segments: four monophthongs, one diphthong and 25 consonants. Hypothesis 2 proposes 54 segments: two monophthongs and 52 consonants. Hypothesis 3 proposes 55 segments: three monophthongs and 52 consonants. The choice between these three hypotheses has significant implications for models of phonological contrast, phonotactic organization, syllable…
An Aboriginal Women’s Song from Arrwek, Central Australia
Songs are a fundamental part of Indigenous Australian cultures. They are vehicles for transmitting experiences about a region, including the stories and ancestral entities from the creation. Yet relatively little is known about the musical characteristics of songs from many parts of Australia. In this article we present the first musical analysis of traditional songs of the Anmatyerr people of central Australia. We analyse a selection of songs fr…
Edible Insect Larvae in Kaytetye: Their Nomenclature and Significance
Insects have traditionally constituted an important source of food in many cultures, but changes in dietary practices and other lifestyle traits are threatening the transmission of insect-related knowledge and vocabulary to younger generations of Indigenous Australians. This paper describes the rich cultural and culinary traditions surrounding an important insect group, namely a class of edible insect larvae consumed by a desert community in cent…
Brilliance as Cognitive Complexity in Aboriginal Australia
Writers on Australian Aboriginal ceremonial practices and contemporary commercial art have identified properties that can be described as producing 'brilliance', the term used by Howard Morphy (1989) for Yolngu visual art. Brilliance involves the emotionally charged knowledge that Ancestral power is manifest. We suggest that, in Australian Aboriginal ceremonial practices and art, two kinds of brilliance are at work, both of which we exemplify usi…
Body part terms in Kaytetye feeling expressions
This paper addresses the question of how feelings are expressed in Kaytetye, a Central Australian language of the Pama-Nyugan family. It identifies three different formal constructions for expressing feelings, and explores the extent to which specific body part terms are associated with types of feelings, based on linguistic evidence in the form of lexical compounds, collocations and the way people talk about feelings. It is suggested that partic…
Artfully hidden: Text and rhythm in a central Australian aboriginal song series
Traditional songs from Central Australia have a text set to an unvarying rhythm, which is in contrast to songs from many other parts of Australia. This has led many researchers to regard text and rhythm of Central Australian Aboriginal songs as 'two facets of the same structure'. In creating this structure the question is whether the setting of text to rhythm is random and thus non-metrical, or whether it is based on regular alignment of textual …
The language of Central Australian Aboriginal songs
The language of Central Australian Aboriginal songs differs markedly from everyday speech. Early research on Aboriginal song texts suggested that the differences between speech and song were insurmountable. In 1886 F.J. Gillen, the postmaster at Alice Springs who was familiar with the Arrernte language, stated:‘What about the words’ etc, I have never yet been able to find out the meaning of any of their Arunta chants and I am doubtful whether the…
The Language of Song: Some Recent Approaches in Description and Analysis
Singing is an activity that happens in every society. But the ways that texts and music align with each other and the ways meanings are conveyed, and how the activity fits into larger contexts vary considerably from society to society. The study of song draws in not only the discipline of musicology but also many fields of linguistic inquiry*phonology, poetics, morphology, semantics and pragmatics. Like words and morphemes, songs are form-meaning…
The Spotted Nightjar Calls When Dingo Pups Are Born: Ecological and Social Indicators In Central Australia
Across cultures there are known signs that signal the availability of certain foods, predict the weather or warn people of impending events. In Central Australia the call of the spotted nightjar (Eurostopodus argus) signals the time when dingo pups are born. This article identifies indicator events known by speakers of the Arandic languages in Central Australia. Indicator events can be described as the presence or behavior of a particular species…
Edge Effects in Warlpiri Yawulyu Songs: Resyllabification, Epenthesis, Final Vowel Modification
Song genres vary as to which aspects of language and music are matched to create a well-formed song. For example, English folk songs match stressed syllables to strong musical beats. Some song styles have no requirements on how language and music should align. This article analyses how text and music align in Warlpiri women's songs from central Australia and finds there are ‘text-setting’ rules for setting text to musical rhythm. We first identif…
Semantic Extension in Kaytetye Flora and Fauna Terms
Flora and fauna play a vital role in Indigenous cultures and their nomenclature reveals much about the society from which they belong. This article identifies the lexical structures and types of metaphor and metonymy that are used for naming plants and animals in Kaytetye, a language of central Australia. By linking semantic analysis to detailed ethnography this paper elucidates the cultural connections that underlie polysemous biota terms. Vario…
Sustaining Women's Yawulyu/Awelye: Some Practitioners' and Learners' Perspectives
In 2010 the authors visited various Central Australian communities, including Willowra, Tennant Creek, Alekarenge, Barrow Creek and Ti Tree, to interview some of our research collaborators past and present about how they saw the present and future of their yawulyu/awelye traditions. Yawulyu (in Warlpiri and Warumungu) and Awelye (in Kaytetye and other Arandic languages) are cognate names for women's country-based rituals, including songs, dancing…
If You Go Down to the Soak Today: Symbolism and Structure in an Arandic Children's Story
In an Aboriginal children's story from Central Australia, small creatures such as dragon lizards and ground-dwelling insect larvae known as ant lions convey rich symbolic meanings. This article analyzes the story, song, and graphic schema of a story that reinforces the dangers of being alone and the unpredictable incarnations of malevolent characters. By comparing versions in several Arandic languages, we elucidate the network of social and cultu…
Language description informed by theory
This volume explores how linguistic theories inform the ways in which languages are described. Theories, as representations of linguistic categories, guide the field linguist to look for various phenomena without presupposing their necessary existence and provide the tools to account for various sets of data across different languages. A goal of linguistic description is to represent the full range of language structures for any given language. T…
Contrastive and Non-contrastive Pre-stopping in Kaytetye
Kaytetye is one of the few Australian languages for which pre-stopping is contrastive for nasals. This paper provides the first quantitative data on the phonetic realization of contrastive pre-stopping for any Australian language. It also provides data on the hitherto unreported non-contrastive pre-stopping of laterals in Kaytetye. The findings demonstrate that contrastive nasal pre-stopping and non-contrastive lateral pre-stopping differ on thre…
The Importance of Insects in Australian Aboriginal Society: A Dictionary Survey
Insects and their products have long been used in Indigenous Australian societies as food, medicine and construction material, and given prominent roles in myths, traditional songs and ceremonies. However, much of the available information on the uses of insects in Australia remains anecdotal. In this essay, we review published dictionaries of Aboriginal languages spoken in many parts of Australia, to provide an overview of the Indigenous names a…
Edible Insect Larvae in Kaytetye: Their Nomenclature and Significance
Insects have traditionally constituted an important source of food in many cultures, but changes in dietary practices and other lifestyle traits are threatening the transmission of insect-related knowledge and vocabulary to younger generations of Indigenous Australians. This paper describes the rich cultural and culinary traditions surrounding an important insect group, namely a class of edible insect larvae consumed by a desert community in cent…
Brilliance as Cognitive Complexity in Aboriginal Australia
Writers on Australian Aboriginal ceremonial practices and contemporary commercial art have identified properties that can be described as producing 'brilliance', the term used by Howard Morphy (1989) for Yolngu visual art. Brilliance involves the emotionally charged knowledge that Ancestral power is manifest. We suggest that, in Australian Aboriginal ceremonial practices and art, two kinds of brilliance are at work, both of which we exemplify usi…
An Aboriginal Women’s Song from Arrwek, Central Australia
Songs are a fundamental part of Indigenous Australian cultures. They are vehicles for transmitting experiences about a region, including the stories and ancestral entities from the creation. Yet relatively little is known about the musical characteristics of songs from many parts of Australia. In this article we present the first musical analysis of traditional songs of the Anmatyerr people of central Australia. We analyse a selection of songs fr…
Central Australian Aboriginal Songs and Biocultural Knowledge: Evidence from Women's Ceremonies Relating to Edible Seeds
Songs encode rich knowledge of the social and ecological worlds of Aboriginal people living in the arid interior of the Australian continent, a desert with one of the most variable rainfalls in the world. People have shaped the ecology of this region in continuous feedback loops over many generations such that there is nowadays a complex system of interdependence between cultural practices and the local ecosystems. Singing traditions are an integ…
Wanji-wanji: The Past and Future of an Aboriginal Travelling Song
Classical Aboriginal culture in Australia consists of many different kinds of ceremonies, including travelling ceremonies that are often shared across linguistic and geographical boundaries. Each of these ceremonies is made up of dozens of different verses. Perhaps the most widely known travelling ceremony is one referred to in some areas as ‘Wanji-wanji’. This was known over half the country and dates back at least 170 years, as evidenced in ele…
Text-setting in Kaytetye
Singing is a universal human activity. Across the vast range of song traditions throughout the world, native speakers have consistent intuitions about how the syllables in a given line of song text should be set to the tunes and/or rhythms within their various song traditions. This paper presents an Optimality Theoretic analysis of text-setting in a set of ceremonial songs traditionally sung and passed on orally by groups of Kaytetye-speaking wom…
Puranguwana’ (‘Perishing in the Sun’) as sung by Patrick Jupiter Smith, Jack Gordon and Marie Gordon
Across Aboriginal Australia, Aboriginal songs are often attributed to the spirit world rather than as compositions by the living. Deceased ancestors give songs to people and such a recipient is described as the finder of a song. This is particularly evident in 'Puranguwana' ('Perishing in the Sun'), a song of the public ceremonial genre known by older men and women at Balgo and Bililuna communities in the south-east Kimberley in Western Australia…
The Kaytetye segmental inventory
There are three phonological hypotheses on the Kaytetye segmental inventory. Hypothesis 1 proposes 30 segments: four monophthongs, one diphthong and 25 consonants. Hypothesis 2 proposes 54 segments: two monophthongs and 52 consonants. Hypothesis 3 proposes 55 segments: three monophthongs and 52 consonants. The choice between these three hypotheses has significant implications for models of phonological contrast, phonotactic organization, syllable…
Ecomusicology, performance and environmental crises: Nurturing human relationships with the environment
This introductory article to the special issue overviews central themes of the field of Ecomusicology as drawn out from the discussions of Indigenous Australian and Aoetearoa New Zealand music and dance performance and/or sound and movement practices as considered with relation to their environments. We discuss how these practices are holistic multimodal art forms, emphasise the importance of deep listening and discuss the role of collective memo…
Ceremony and sentient ecology
Many cultures use songs to influence the world around them (e.g. Levin 2006, Feld 1982). In Australian Aboriginal societies, song can be a tool to influence one’s environment. Such practices can affect the physical world—people, animals, plants— and the non-physical world, where spirit beings reside, a realm referred to as the Altyerre in Arandic languages of central Australia (Dobson 2007, Turner 2010, Wallace & Lovell 2009, Green 2012). Like th…
Linguistics (13 works) · Computer Science (11 works) · Art (9 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Australian Indigenous Culture and History (8 works) · Linguistic Variation and Morphology (8 works) · Diverse Musicological Studies (7 works) · Geography (7 works) · History (7 works) · History (6 works)