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This book builds on R. M. W. Dixon's most influential work on the languages of North Queensland. It brings together studies in the fields of phonology, syntax, language contact, and language attrition, illustrated with examples of the unusual and theoretically significant features of the languages studied.
List of contents
- 1: Background
- Part I: Genders and Classifiers
- 2: Edible and the other genders in Dyirbal
- 3: Classifiers in Yidiñ
- Part II: Kin Relations and How to Talk with Them
- 4: The Dyirbal kinship system
- 5: Jalnguy, the 'mother-in-law' speech style in Dyirbal
- 6: The origin of 'mother-in-law' vocabulary in Dyirbal and Yidiñ
- Part III: Grammatical Studies
- 7: Comparing the syntactic orientations of Dyirbal and Yidi
- 8: Serial verb constructions in Dyirbal
- 9: Complementation strategies in Dyirbal
- 10: Grammatical reanalysis in Warrgamay
- Part IV: Variation, Contact, and Change
- 11: Dyirbal grammar: Variation across dialects
- 12: Dyirbal dialectology: Lexical Variation
- 13: Compensatory phonological changes
- 14: A study of language contact
- Part V: Languages Fading Away
- 15: The last change in Yidiñ
- 16: The gradual decline of Dyirbal
- Acknowledgements
- References
- Index
About the author
R. M. W. Dixon is Adjunct Professor and Deputy Director of the Language and Culture Research Centre at James Cook University. He has published grammars of a number of Australian languages (including Dyirbal and Yidiñ), in addition to A Grammar of Boumaa Fijian (University of Chicago Press, 1988), The Jarawara Language of Southern Amazonia (OUP, 2004; paperback 2011), and A Semantic Approach to English Grammar (OUP, 2005). His theoretical works include Where have All the Adjectives Gone? And other Essays on Semantics and Syntax (De Gruyter, 1982), Ergativity (CUP, 1994), the three volume work Basic Linguistic Theory (OUP, 2010-12), and most recently Making New Words: Morphological Derivation in English (OUP 2014).
Summary
This book builds on R. M. W. Dixon's most influential work on the languages of North Queensland. It brings together studies in the fields of phonology, syntax, language contact, and language attrition, illustrated with examples of the unusual and theoretically significant features of the languages studied.
