Bardi temperature terms

Bardi is a non-Pama-Nyungan (Nyulnyulan) language from Australia’s north. Bardi’s three temperature terms (moola ‘hot/warm’, inkoorr ‘cold’, and binyj(a) ‘cooled down’) are here discussed and exemplified. We give a survey of the syntactic constructions in which temperature terms appear, and discuss the semantics and range of each term. Bardi temperature terms have meanings beyond the temperature sphere, in the domain of ripeness and freshness. Bardi is perhaps unusual in having a split of terms for ‘cold’ which is governed by aspect rather than gradation, though there are other similar adjectival pairs elsewhere in Bardi. Temperature terms are not used metaphorically in the language. We conclude with discussion of the etymology of temperature descriptors in Bardi and other Nyulnyulan languages

Linguistics: Evolution and Language Change

SummaryLinguists have long identified sound changes that occur in parallel. Now novel research shows how Bayesian modeling can capture complex concerted changes, revealing how evolution of sounds proceeds

Reflections on linguistic fieldwork

In this reflections piece, I draw upon my experience as a fieldworker in Australia, a linguist who also works with archival materials spanning 150 years, and a linguist whose work includes both documentary and descriptive aspects. I center this piece around three questions about aspects of fieldwork that have changed since the publication of Himmelmann (1998). The first is what we collect—that is, have our field methods changed? The second question concerns the documentation we produce—is it different? Thirdly, are there features of Himmelmann’s manifesto which were the products of its time, and has academia changed? Arguably in all cases that there has been change for the better, but we still have some way to go, and that some of the original formulation of a dichotomy between documentation and description are counterproductive.National Foreign Language Resource Cente

‘Lone Wolves’ and Collaboration: A Reply to Crippen & Robinson (2013)

In this reply to Crippen & Robinson’s (2013) contribution to Language Documentation & Conservation, we discuss recent perspectives on ‘collaborative’ linguistics and the many roles that linguists play in language communities. We question Crippen & Robinson’s characterization of the state of the field and their conclusions regarding the utility of collaborative fieldwork. We argue that their characterization of collaborative fieldwork is unrealistic and their complaints are based on a caricature of what linguists actually do when they work together with communities. We also question their emphasis on the ‘outsider’ linguist going into a community, given the increasing number of indigenous scholars working on their own languages and partnering with ‘outsider’ academics. We outline ways in which collaborative work does not compromise theoretical scholarship. Both collaborative and so-called ‘lone wolf’ approaches bring advantages and disadvantages to the linguist, but lone wolf linguistics can have considerable disadvantages to communities who are already excluded from research. Documentary linguists, as representatives of their profession, should make use of the most effective techniques they can, given that in many cases, that linguist’s work may well be the only lasting record of the language.National Foreign Language Resource Cente

Automatic categorization of prosodic contours in Bardi

This study presents preliminary results of an automated prosodic clustering analysis of Bardi, a Nyulnyulan language from Northern Australia, using methods from Kaland (2021). Previous work on Bardi prosody identified several functions of boundary tones and two main phrase types, but stressed that findings were preliminary. Here we extend that work and show evidence for several additional phrase types, as well as confirming the overall accuracy of automated clustering. This work adds to the prosodic typology of Australian languages (cf. Fletcher et al. 2002) and provides further evidence for the functions of intonation beyond demarcation in these languages. When coupled with evaluation by a knowledgeable researcher, this automated approach can greatly expedite prosodic analysis on a large scale and expand our typology of prosodic systems