Coordination Strategies in Australian Aboriginal Languages

This project is funded by a Small Grant from the British Academy for collaborative work with Rachel Nordlinger, Department of Linguistics, University of Melbourne. We are gratefully for the support from the British Academy (SG-39545) which enables us to work together on this topic.

Questionnaire

To date there has been very little typological or theoretical research on coordination in Australian Aboriginal languages, and indeed the typological literature on coordination in general is scarce. A notable exception is Haspelmath 2004 (ed), which covers both NP and clausal coordination, but this collection contains no work on Australian languages; another is Austin 1988 (ed), on complex sentential constructions in Australian languages, which contains some discussion of clausal coordination only. The current project aims to redress this situation by undertaking collaborative descriptive and theoretical work on NP coordination strategies in Australian Aboriginal languages, and exploring the implications of data on NP coordination in these languages for morphological and syntactic theory. The current paucity of data is particularly critical since very many of these languages are highly endangered.

We have produced a questionnaire which gives an overview of the sorts of phenomena found in nominal coordinate structures in the Australian languages for which we have access to data, and suggests some avenues for further data collection. The questionnaire can be downloaded here

Papers and Conference Presentations

Our theoretical work exploring the data on NP coordination will be carried out within Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG). LFG offers significant advantages as a framework for this work. It provides a well-understood and very stable framework for linguistic description and has been successfully and insightfully applied in the description of a large number of non-Indo European languages with radically different properties from those of more familiar European languages, including those with rich morphological resources. Moreover a substantial body of work in LFG on Australian languages already exists (Simpson 1991, Andrews 1996, Nordlinger 1998, Austin and Bresnan 1996). A considerable amount of work on the morphosyntax of coordination has also been carried out within this framework (Kaplan and Maxwell 1988, Dalrymple and Kaplan 2000, Sadler 1999, 2003 and in press, Dalrymple and King in press, Manning and Maxwell 1996).

  • Louisa Sadler and Rachel Nordlinger. Apposition and Coordination in Australian Languages: an LFG analysis. Under review, version of May 15 2007.

  • Louisa Sadler and Rachel Nordlinger. Apposition as Coordination: evidence from Australian Languages. LFG 2006, Konstanz, Germany, July 2006.

  • Louisa Sadler and Rachel Nordlinger. NP Coordination in Australian Languages. Presented at Alliance Worshop, Paris, September 2005.

  • Louisa Sadler and Rachel Nordlinger. NP Coordination in Australian Languages. Presented at ALS 2005, Melbourne, September 2005.

  • Rachel Nordlinger and Louisa Sadler. Coordination Strategies in Australian Languages. Presented at the annual Blackwood workshop, March 2005.

    • Last Updated 21/05/07