William B Mcgregor
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 628220 |
|---|---|
| NOME | William B Mcgregor |
| PRENOMES | William B |
| SOBRENOME | Mcgregor |
| ASSINATURA | MCGREGOR W B |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Aarhus University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1803-1943 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 60 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 324 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 59 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1985 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 9 |
Hermann Klaatsch and his linguistic research in Northwestern Australia
This paper explores the little-known documentation of the Nyulnyul language of Dampier Land, Western Australia, by the German physician, anatomist, physical anthropologist and evolutionist Hermann Klaatsch (1863–1916). During his two stays at the Beagle Bay Mission in 1905 and 1906, Klaatsch compiled wordlists amounting to almost 900 words in Nyulnyul, some arranged alphabetically on the Nyulnyul term and some according to semantic domains. Most …
The expression of knowing and ignorance in the Indigenous languages of Australia
This paper examines a poorly studied theme in Australianist linguistics, the expression of knowing and ignorance. The investigation is typological, based on a sample of 149 Indigenous Australian languages, largely a convenience sample, though most major genetic groupings and geographical regions are covered. It examines basic lexemes and grammatical constructions employed in expressing knowledge and ignorance. It is shown that many languages lexi…
On the expression of mistaken beliefs in Australian languages
This paper explores the expression of mistaken beliefs – as in for example the boy mistakenly believes that the turtle is dead (whereas in fact it is alive) – in the Indigenous languages of Australia. It is shown that some mode of expressing this meaning is attested in around 40% of the languages in a selection of 149 language varieties. In over 90% of the languages showing some mode of expressing the target meaning, it is – or can be – achieved …
Thought complements in Australian languages
Missionary and Other Traditions in Australia
This chapter sets out in broad brush some of the main trends in lexicographic work on the indigenous languages of mainland Australia and nearby islands – some of the major ones being Torres Strait Islands, Bathurst Island, Melville Island, Groote Eylandt, Mornington Island, and Bentinck Island – by missionaries, from the early days of contact with Europeans to the present. Prior to contact with Europeans, some 400 languages were indigenous to thi…
The evolutionary origins of interpersonal grammar
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Unusual manner constructions in Shua (Khoe-Kwadi, Botswana)
This paper describes a set of three interrelated constructions in Shua (Khoe-Kwadi, Botswana) that make reference to the manner of performance of an event, or to the condition of an entity or entities either in general or as they are involved in an event or situation. There is a subordinate version of the construction that employs reduplication of the verb and a marked case of the subject to signal subordinate status. The other two types are main…
Culture, Interaction and Person Reference in an Australian Language
Reviewed by: Culture, Interaction and Person Reference in an Australian Language: An Ethnography of Bininj Gunwok Communication by Murray Garde William B. McGregor Culture, Interaction and Person Reference in an Australian Language: An Ethnography of Bininj Gunwok Communication. Murray Garde. Culture and Language Use 11. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2013. Pp. xx + 274. $149.00 (hardcover). This book makes a very welcome and important contribution t…
Four counter-presumption constructions in Shua (Khoe-Kwadi, Botswana)
Grammaticalisation of verbs into temporal and modal markers in Australian languages
In this paper I present some speculative stories about the development from verbs of some TAM markers in Australian languages. The verbs in question are basic and high frequency ones, including ‘say, do’, which can appear as a marker of inceptive aspect; telic, accomplishment, or activity Aktionsart; desiderative and possibly irrealis and imperative moods; and future tense. Rather than focussing on what particular lexical verbs might grammaticali…
Optionality in grammar and language use
This paper investigates optionality in grammar and language use, and argues that there is optionality and optionality, and thus that it is essential that we be much more careful than hitherto in categorizing linguistic entities as optional. Equipped with a suitably constrained construal of the term, it is possible to formulate testable generalizations about optionality. Specifically, it is always meaningful in the sense that the contrast between …
Kin Terms and Context among the Gooniyandi
This article discusses some unusual uses of kin terms in Gooniyandi (non-Pama-Nyungan, Australia), uses that are unexpected given their senses as they appear from the context of elicitation. These usages are strongly associated with specific linguistic and interactive contexts; they are not, however, determined by the contexts, but equally construct them. It is argued that these uses imply the need to distinguish coded semantic meaning, contextua…
Death Practices in the North West of Australia
All human societies have rites and taboos surrounding death. In mainstream Australian society, for instance, the dead are disposed of in rites of the funeral, either by burial or cremation. And there is a taboo -which usually lasts for some weeks or months -on mentioning the words 'dead', 'death', 'die' (and many others such as Trick the bucket', 'croak') to, or in the presence of close relatives of the dead; this taboo is particularly strong in …
Gooniyandi Stories of Early Contact with Whites
A Paper is presented on three Gooniyandi texts, identifying themes and the ways in which they are dealt with. These texts are compared with texts on similar themes from other Australian groups
The Languages of the Kimberley, Western Australia
The Kimberley, the far north-west of Australia, is one of the most linguistically diverse regions of the continent. Some fifty-five Aboriginal languages belonging to five different families are spoken within its borders. Few of these languages are currently being passed on to children, most of whom speak Kriol (a new language that arose about half a century ago from an earlier Pidgin English) or Aboriginal English (a dialect of English) as their …
Optional ergative case marking systems in a typological-semiotic perspective
Optional ergative marking and its implications for linguistic theory
The Expression of Possession
?This collection of nine original articles deals with the expression of possession at various levels of grammar, morphological, phrasal, and syntactic, and from a typologically diverse range of languages (including Germanic, Oceanic, Meso-American, and Australian Aboriginal). There are two main aims. The first is to reveal something of the range of constructions employed cross-linguistically in the expression of possession, and second, to present…
Teaching & Learning Guide for
Author’s Introduction Ergativity refers to patterning in which Agents (transitive subjects) show different linguistic behaviour to Actors (intransitive subjects), which behave in the same way as Undergoers (transitive objects). Such patterning may be expressed at any linguistic level, morphological, syntactic, lexical or semantic. At the morphological level, there is ergative case marking, in which the Agent is case marked differently from the Ac…
Macquarie Aboriginal Words
Section on language centres and notes on contributors. Includes an Aboriginal language index and English index.
The structure of Gooniyandi narratives
Nyibayarri, Kimberley tracker
Bohemia tells stories from his police tracking days: finding lost people, murderers, thieves and horse rustlers as well as leper patrols. A rich history based on a complex understanding of black-white relations.
The discourse basis of ergative marking in Gooniyandi
This paper investigates “optional” ergative marking in Gooniyandi (Kimberley, Western Australia): that is, the phenomenon whereby the ergative case-marking postposition may be either present or omitted from an Agent phrase. On the basis of an investigation of a corpus of narrative texts it is argued that the presence vs. absence is semantically significant. In particular, it is suggested that use of the ergative marker foregrounds the agentivity …
The Nyulnyul language of Dampier Land, Western Australia
Encountering Aboriginal languages
History of research on Australian languages, held in Aarhus University on 24-25 June 2002.Six of the papers in this volume were presented at that workshop, namely those presented in Chapters 1-3, 5, 8, and 17.This represents all of the contributions to the workshop dealing with the historical topic, with a single exception, my own paper on the work of Frs Hermann Nekes and Ernest Worms, which appeared in a reconstituted form in the editorial intr…
Optional ergative case marking systems in a typological-semiotic perspective
Focal and optional ergative marking in Warrwa (Kimberley, Western Australia)
Verb Classification in Australian Languages
This book deals with systems of verb classification in Australian Aboriginal languages, with particular focus on languages of the north-west. It proposes a typology of the systems according to their main formal and semantic characteristics. It also makes some proposals concerning the historical origins and grammaticisation of these systems, and suggestions regarding the grammatical relations involved. In addition, an attempt is made to situate th…
The grammar of reported speech and thought in Gooniyandi
This paper investigates the grammar of reported speech and thought in Gooniyandi, a Bunuban language of the southern Kimberley, Western Australia. According to a traditional analysis, indirect speech reports would be embedded in the clause of speech; such an analysis cannot be maintained for Gooniyandi. Nor can recent proposals such as those of Foley and van Valin (1984) and Halliday (1985) that subordination or hypotaxis is involved. Instead, a …
Encountering Aboriginal languages
History of research on Australian languages, held in Aarhus University on 24-25 June 2002.Six of the papers in this volume were presented at that workshop, namely those presented in Chapters 1-3, 5, 8, and 17.This represents all of the contributions to the workshop dealing with the historical topic, with a single exception, my own paper on the work of Frs Hermann Nekes and Ernest Worms, which appeared in a reconstituted form in the editorial intr…
The Languages of the Kimberley, Western Australia
The Kimberley, the far north-west of Australia, is one of the most linguistically diverse regions of the continent. Some fifty-five Aboriginal languages belonging to five different families are spoken within its borders. Few of these languages are currently being passed on to children, most of whom speak Kriol (a new language that arose about half a century ago from an earlier Pidgin English) or Aboriginal English (a dialect of English) as their …
The Nyulnyul language of Dampier Land, Western Australia
The semantics of ergative marking in Gooniyandi
Optional ergative marking and its implications for linguistic theory
Typology of Ergativity
Ergativity refers to patterning in a language whereby the subject of a transitive clause behaves differently to the subject of an intransitive clause, which behaves like the object of a transitive clause. Ergativity can be manifested in morphology, lexicon, syntax, and discourse organisation. This article overviews what is known about ergativity in the world's languages, with a particular focus on one type of morphological ergativity, namely in c…
Missionary linguistics in the Kimberley, Western Australia
This paper explores the contribution of missionary linguists to the documentation, description, and maintenance of Aboriginal languages of the Kimberley region of Western Australia from the establishment of the first enduring mission in 1890 to 1960. It is argued that the primary contribution was to language documentation. However, the descriptive contribution was not negligible, and many missionary linguists struggled intelligently with the desc…
Ergative Marking of Intransitive Subjects in Warrwa
As in a number of ergative languages, the ergative case-marker -na∼-ma in Warrwa is occasionally found on the subject of intransitive clauses, indeed even on the subject of verbless clauses. I argue that the presence vs. absence of the ergative marker in this environment is not random free variation, but is motivated and highly constrained. The paper is concerned with identifying the motivations. It is proposed, based on an investigation of uses …
Optionality in grammar and language use
This paper investigates optionality in grammar and language use, and argues that there is optionality and optionality, and thus that it is essential that we be much more careful than hitherto in categorizing linguistic entities as optional. Equipped with a suitably constrained construal of the term, it is possible to formulate testable generalizations about optionality. Specifically, it is always meaningful in the sense that the contrast between …
Sound symbolism in Gooniyandi, a language of Western Australia
In Gooniyandi, a non-Pama-Nyungan Australian Aboriginal language spoken in the vicinity of Fitzroy Crossing in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, many verb roots end in consonants, unlike roots of other classes, which are almost always vowel final. The distribution of final consonants across the class of verb roots is examined, and it is shown that those ending in the same consonant tend to cluster together into a small number of semantic…
The Medio-Active Construction in Nyulnyulan Languages
Most Nyulnyulan languages (non-Pama-Nyungan, Western Australia), show an unusual clause type, the medio-active, with the case-frame of a transitive clause, but the verbal agreement of an intransitive clause; there is no formal registration in the verb. This paper provides a detailed description of the structural and semantic properties of this clause type in each language that exhibits it, identifying shared features and differences. Evidence is …
Complementation as interpersonal grammar
This paper is concerned with a range of complex sentence constructions including They said to shave, They knew that I had shaved, They forced me to shave which are generally regarded as "object complements". It is proposed that this analysis is mistaken: complement clauses do not serve as objects. Rather, I will argue that the majority of these constructions are characterized by interclausal grammatical relations of the type referred to in McGreg…
Thought complements in Australian languages
Kin Terms and Context among the Gooniyandi
This article discusses some unusual uses of kin terms in Gooniyandi (non-Pama-Nyungan, Australia), uses that are unexpected given their senses as they appear from the context of elicitation. These usages are strongly associated with specific linguistic and interactive contexts; they are not, however, determined by the contexts, but equally construct them. It is argued that these uses imply the need to distinguish coded semantic meaning, contextua…
Another view of the Gooniyandi "counterfactual" and its implications to the Van linden-Verstraete typology
"Frs. Hermann Nekes and Ernest Worms's "Australian Languages
Anthropos , Seite 99 - 114
A massacre on Christmas Creek station
(1992). A massacre on Christmas Creek station. Journal of Australian Studies: Vol. 16, No. 33, pp. 26-40
Photographs of aborigines and police
Body parts in Kuniyanti clause grammar
Body parts in Kuniyanti clause grammar
Mood and Subodination in Kuniyanti
Structural Analysis of the Police‐tracker Story Genre in Gooniyandi
This paper investigates the structure and socio‐cultural functions of a class of narrative texts in the Gooniyandi language of the Fitzroy Crossing area (Kimberley, W.A.). These are ‘police‐tracker stories’: narratives relating actual incidents involving the police and police trackers; most are autobiographical accounts told to me by Jack Bohemia, a former police tracker. It is argued that the texts of this type constitute a genre, characterised …
Greenberg on the first person inclusive dual
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Alienability, Inalienability and Nominal Classification
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1989), pp. 24-36
Structures of Language and Myth
In this paper we analyse a text in Gooniyandi (southern Kimberley, Western Australia), a myth about the acquisition of fire. Our analysis, broadly structuralist‐functionalist in orientation, uses a number of complementary modes of myth analysis, including a variety of structuralism which draws on Lévi‐Strauss. Our main point, however, differs from his concerns. It is that the analysis of a myth (indeed, of any text) cannot be pursued independentl…
A Functional Grammar of Gooniyandi
This volume sets out to provide a comprehensive description of the grammar of Gooniyandi, a non-Pama-Nyungan language of the southern-central Kimberley region of Western Australia. It covers phonetics and phonology, word phrase and clause structure, and the semantics of closed-class grammatical items. The major focus is, however, on meaning: how do Gooniyandi speakers mean with and in their language. To this end, the theoretical framework of syst…
An impersonal construction in Gooniyandi
Photographs of aborigines and police
Clause types in Gooniyandi
A massacre on Christmas Creek station
(1992). A massacre on Christmas Creek station. Journal of Australian Studies: Vol. 16, No. 33, pp. 26-40
The semantics of ergative marking in Gooniyandi
Speaking in Black and White
Complex sentence constructions in Nyulnyul, Western Australia
This paper investigates complex sentence constructions in Nyulnyul (Kimberley, Western Australia). Three primary types of inter-clausal relationships — embedding (part-whole), dependence (part-part) and scope (whole-whole) — permit an initial typology of complex sentence types. This paper focuses on embedding and dependence, ignoring scope. It is argued that non-finite clauses must be embedded in a finite clause, whereas finite clauses cannot be,…
The grammar of reported speech and thought in Gooniyandi
This paper investigates the grammar of reported speech and thought in Gooniyandi, a Bunuban language of the southern Kimberley, Western Australia. According to a traditional analysis, indirect speech reports would be embedded in the clause of speech; such an analysis cannot be maintained for Gooniyandi. Nor can recent proposals such as those of Foley and van Valin (1984) and Halliday (1985) that subordination or hypotaxis is involved. Instead, a …
Languages of the World
Arguments for the category of verb phrase
The category VP has since the late 1950s attracted a considerable amount of interest in both formally and functionally oriented linguistics, though in the latter to a lesser extent. There is a substantial amount of disagreement amongst linguists as to the status of this category, and as to its nature and extent amongst those who adopt it. Unfortunately, however, the literature contains few if any convincing arguments either for or against the cat…
Prolegomena to a theory of inalienability
International audience
The Grammar of Inalienability
International audience
Sound symbolism in Gooniyandi, a language of Western Australia
In Gooniyandi, a non-Pama-Nyungan Australian Aboriginal language spoken in the vicinity of Fitzroy Crossing in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, many verb roots end in consonants, unlike roots of other classes, which are almost always vowel final. The distribution of final consonants across the class of verb roots is examined, and it is shown that those ending in the same consonant tend to cluster together into a small number of semantic…
How many types of internal conjunction
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The Medio-Active Construction in Nyulnyulan Languages
Most Nyulnyulan languages (non-Pama-Nyungan, Western Australia), show an unusual clause type, the medio-active, with the case-frame of a transitive clause, but the verbal agreement of an intransitive clause; there is no formal registration in the verb. This paper provides a detailed description of the structural and semantic properties of this clause type in each language that exhibits it, identifying shared features and differences. Evidence is …
Semiotic Grammar
Ideophones as the source of verbs in Northern Australian languages
Verb Classification in Australian Languages
This book deals with systems of verb classification in Australian Aboriginal languages, with particular focus on languages of the north-west. It proposes a typology of the systems according to their main formal and semantic characteristics. It also makes some proposals concerning the historical origins and grammaticisation of these systems, and suggestions regarding the grammatical relations involved. In addition, an attempt is made to situate th…
Linguistics (46 obras) · Philosophy (46 obras) · Computer Science (30 obras) · History (30 obras) · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation (23 obras) · Linguistic Variation and Morphology (22 obras) · Sociology (21 obras) · Australian Indigenous Culture and History (19 obras) · Philosophy (18 obras) · History (16 obras)