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This paper is a lexical study of rations – flour, sugar, tea and tobacco – in Australian languages. The distribution of food played an important role in relations between Aboriginal people and colonizers: this study complements existing historical and ethnographic work on the topic by investigating the lexicon of rations in a set of 197 languages across Australia. We discern a number of patterns. There are relatively few extensions of terms for traditional equivalents in the case of 'flour', 'sugar' and 'tea', for a number of reasons, while 'tobacco' shows more such extensions. Extensions based on other terms highlight semantic features like texture for flour and sugar, shape of the main ingredient for tea, and smoking as the new mode of consumption for tobacco. Other minor patterns highlight colour, processing and flavour. There is also some areal patterning in the data, some related to borrowing, from Austronesian languages as well as internally, and others based on semantic structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyses the structure of lexical roots in the Lamalamic languages of Cape York Peninsula, in the northeast of Australia. The analysis shows how Lamalamic roots are shaped diachronically by processes of erosion and expansion, leading to root forms that are unusual by Australian standards. Erosion processes include the loss of initial consonants, resulting in vowel-initial roots, and the loss of entire initial syllables, resulting in monosyllabic roots. Expansion processes include leftward expansion through the addition of meaningless VC prefixes, and rightward expansion through morphological augmentation and subsequent semantic bleaching. The analysis describes the basic processes involved for the languages, using historical-comparative and phonotactic evidence, and brings out two points of more general relevance. First, the analysis proposes an analogy-based mechanism to explain loss of initial vowels, which complements the classic account in terms of gradual initial weakening. Second, the analysis also suggests that erosion and expansion processes may be functionally related, in that there is some evidence that expansion processes could originate in a mechanism to counterbalance the development of monosyllables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the functions of represented speech and thought (RST) in narratives in Umpithamu, a Pama-Nyungan language of Cape York Peninsula (Australia). The paper first surveys the different mechanisms available for marking a shift from the narrator's deictic centre to a narrative participant, including a number of constructions that use perception and motion predicates to signal RST. The analysis then focuses on the narrative functions of RST, showing that it has a macrostructural function beyond the representation of a specific participant's speech and thought, more specifically highlighting the central episodes of a narrative. The evidence comes from an analysis of three genres with a different macrostructure: one (personal history) for which the classic Labovian schema of complication–resolution works well and two others (both dealing with the supernatural world) that rely on different structuring principles. It is shown that RST is systematically associated with central episodes across the three genres, and that the location and nature of RST co-vary with the different location and nature of these episodes in the three genres. In narratives of supernatural encounter, for instance, RST conveys modal negotiation about the interpretation of the central events in terms of the supernatural world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates construction-level effects of animacy for Agents in a set of Australian languages. It is shown that the presence of an inanimate Agent can not only affect the marking of the Agent, but also the marking of the verb and of the Undergoer. On the basis of a detailed study of the extent of these effects in specific languages, it is shown that they are not always directly related to animacy, but can also be related to factors that are typically but not exclusively associated with animacy, like unusual instigation and unusual affectedness. It is also shown that there is a correlation between the part of the construction that is affected, and the type of motivation. Special marking of the Agent tends to be a direct animacy effect, while special marking of verbal transitivity is an effect of unusual instigation, and special marking of the Undergoer is an effect of unusual affectedness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the semantic development of the adjectives essential and crucial in deontic meaning. The authors emphasize that the two adjectives are considered loan words in the Romance origin. The dynamic modality demands indications of abilities, possibilities, and necessities which inherent the agents of actions or in situations like agent-internal and situation-internal dynamic expressions. The semantic permeability of the relational nouns involved in the meaning of the adjective essential is expressed. Moreover, some factors that drive the various semantic changes of the adjectives are also discussed.

This study investigates an unusual pattern of mood marking found in the past-tense counterparts of purposive and apprehensive complex sentences in some Australian languages. The secondary clause in these constructions, which will be called past intentional constructions, is typically marked for mood even though the event described is often known to have taken place, and in some cases the mood markers have counterfactual meanings even though the constructions as such do not have any counterfactual meaning. It is argued that past intentional constructions can be defined on the basis of a combination of two features: (1) mood marking in the secondary clause, which adduces a semantic feature of (un)desirability; and (2) a link of this mood to the agent of the main clause, which creates a relation of intended or avoided realization between the main clause and the secondary clause. This analysis can help both to motivate the presence of mood marking in these constructions, and to explain the apparently unmotivated use of mood markers with counterfactual meaning, which is shown to be a cancellable implicature rather than a basic meaning of the mood markers in question. In addition, the analysis also suggests that purposive, apprehensive and past intentional constructions constitute a formally and functionally intermediate category between constructions of speech and thought representation and constructions of adverbial modification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]