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This study analyses the role of conjunctions in clause linkage in Australian languages. Conjunctions are seemingly straightforward clause-linking devices, but they remain under-studied, both for Australian languages and from a broader typological perspective. In this study, we propose a functional definition of conjunctions, as set against other resources for clause linkage. We show that this captures not just the prototypical free-standing elements (the equivalents of if, because, but etc.), but also various types of bound markers with a similar function (bound to clause-scoping positions or predicates). We survey the role of conjunctions in a representative sample of 53 Australian languages, showing that they are not a marginal clause linkage resource in Australia, as seems to be assumed in the relevant literature, but often form a major category within clause linkage systems. We also identify a number of areal patterns, based on the size of conjunction inventories and their morphosyntactic features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even if we restrict our scope to epistemic counterfactuals, as Klein does implicitly, it is hard to maintain that protases are invariably optional, and that conditional and single-clause counterfactuals are simply variants of each other. In Klein's analysis, conditionals are mere variants of single-clause counterfactuals, with the protasis as an optional contributor to the topic features of the main clause. In Yawuru, for instance, counterfactuality is marked by the conjunction used in the protasis, as shown in (8) below: the counterfactual protasis in (8a) uses I narli-nyurdany i , while the standard conditional protasis in (8b) uses I narli-yirr i . In other words, Klein's definition of "true in some world ... with the properties of the protasis" is not so much incorrect as incomplete: it deals with only one specific subtype of modality, viz. epistemic modality as expressed by conditionals. [Extracted from the article]

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]

Mbarrumbathama is a clan-named variety of Lamalama, a language of Cape York Peninsula, in the northeast of Australia. Together with Umbuygamu (Ogilvie 1994, Sommer 1998, Verstraete 2017) and Rimanggudinhma (Godman 1993), Lamalama forms the Lamalamic subgroup of Paman languages (Laycock 1969, Rigsby 1997, Verstraete 2018), themselves a subgroup of Pama-Nyungan (Hale 1964, 1966; see also Bowern & Atkinson 2012). The language is no longer spoken, but it is traditionally associated with about 20 clans (as reconstructed by Rigsby 1999, 2014) belonging to the southern shores of Princess Charlotte Bay, on the east coast of Cape York Peninsula (see Figure 1). The clans' estates are mainly coastal, extending from the Normanby River mouth in the east to about 10 km west of the North Kennedy River mouth, but they also include some inland estates (see Rigsby 1992: 356). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Umbuygamu is a Pama-Nyungan language of the east coast of Cape York Peninsula, in the northeast of Australia. Genetically, the language belongs to the Lamalamic subgroup (Laycock 1969, Rigsby 1997) of Paman languages, themselves a subgroup of Pama-Nyungan (as proposed by Hale 1964, 1966; see also Bowern & Atkinson 2012). Umbuygamu is the language of three clans at the southern end of Princess Charlotte Bay, about halfway up the east coast of Cape York Peninsula. Their estates are centred on a lagoon called Emanha (or Dinner Hole in English); they extend inland into the upper Running Creek system, and include the Cliff Islands group along the coast; see Rigsby 1992 for more details, and Verstraete & Rigsby (2015: 2) for a map of the region and its languages. Neighbouring languages are the Middle Paman language Umpithamu, along the coast to the north (see, for instance, Verstraete 2010, 2012) and two Lamalamic languages, Rimanggudinhma to the southwest (located inland; Godman 1993, Sommer 1999b), and Lamalama to the southeast (along the coast; Sommer 1999a). [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 investigates the genetic status of Lamalamic, a grouping of Lamalama, Umbuygamu, and Rimanggudinhma, three languages from the east coast of Cape York Peninsula (Australia). Lamalamic has long been assumed in the literature to form a subgroup of Paman (Pama-Nyungan), but its status as a genetic unit has not yet been examined in a systematic way. I provide evidence from historical phonology and morphology to show that the three languages do form a subgroup of Paman, defined by shared innovations in phonology and morphology. At the same time, the analysis also provides a detailed picture of the origins of some of the unusual phonological properties that set the Lamalamic languages apart in the broader Australian context, like the development of fricative series, prenasalized plosives, voicing contrasts for plosives and trills, dental glides, and CV metathesis resulting in diphthongs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines whether Australian languages generally lack clear noun phrase structures, as has sometimes been argued in the literature. We break up the notion of NP constituency into a set of concrete typological parameters, and analyse these across a sample of 100 languages, representing a significant portion of diversity on the Australian continent. We show that there is little evidence to support general ideas about the absence of NP structures, and we argue that it makes more sense to typologize languages on the basis of where and how they allow 'classic' NP construal, and how this fits into the broader range of construals in the nominal domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the adnominal use of personal pronouns in a sample of 75 Australian languages. We develop two arguments. First, we argue that in all of the adnominal uses examined, the personal pronoun has a determiner-like function, showing both the functional properties and some of the behaviour of more typical determiner categories like demonstratives or articles. We support this analysis with evidence from positioning tendencies, semantics and discourse functions, and indications of grammaticization in some languages. Secondly, we show that this phenomenon is relatively widespread in Australia, occurring in about half of the languages examined here. We identify five potential geographic clusters, one or two of which can be analyzed as areally determined groupings around a centre with incipient grammaticization. From a typological perspective, these data present new evidence for a somewhat under-studied pathway to nominal determination, in addition to better-studied pathways involving demonstratives, numerals or adjectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a critical examination of the widespread idea that A and O (and Agents and Patients) are each other's mirror image in terms of case marking and semantic features. We examine patterns of differential case marking for nouns in a sample of 185 languages, showing that the behaviour of A cannot be captured in terms of markedness reversal based on models for O marking. We highlight pecularities of A marking that are not found with O marking, like sensitivity to the feature of motivity, and syntactic restrictions on use as A, and use these to develop an independent account of A marking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] Swedish and Danish have two types of independent complement constructions. [•] The expressive type is an instance of insubordination. [•] The elaborative type is not an instance of insubordination, but instantiates a general mechanism of dependency shift. [•] Pragmatic dependence is incompatible with insubordination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an analysis of complement insubordination in Dutch, i.e. structures that are formally marked as subordinate complement clauses but conventionally used as main clauses. We develop a typology of seven distinct construction types (in three semantic domains), none of which have been analyzed in detail before. From a more general perspective, we show that insubordinate constructions provide a fresh perspective on the analysis of modality and evaluation, with semantic parameters that are not found in more typical exponents like modal verbs. In addition, we show that it is difficult to develop a schematic generalization across the different construction types, in spite of their apparent formal similarity as complement structures. We argue that this points to separate developmental trajectories for the different types, with a point of origin in different main-subordinate constructions, and different degrees of conventionalization for the resulting insubordinate constructions. [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 paper is a semantic analysis of ''experienced action'' constructions in Umpithamu, a Paman language from Cape York Peninsula (Australia). The basic argument is that these constructions are related to the better-attested category of experiencer object constructions (e.g. Evans, Non-nominative subjects 1: 69--192, 2004), which in Umpithamu describe involuntary experience of bodily processes. Experienced action constructions extend the feature of ''involuntary experience'' from processes within the body to actions originating outside the body, and thus provide a semantically marked alternative for standard transitive clauses. The constructions are typologically interesting because they show the need to identify different loci of experiential semantics in a construction, and they help to clarify the status of control for human Undergoers within semantic typologies of reduced transitivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This study analyses the semantics of English deontic adjectives like essential and appropriate, and uses this to refine traditional definitions of deontic modality, which are mainly based on the study of modal verbs. In a first step, it is shown that the set of meanings associated with deontic adjectives is quite different from the set of meanings identified in the literature on modal verbs. Adjectives lack the directive meanings of obligation or permission, which are traditionally regarded as the core deontic categories, and they have semantic extensions towards non-modal meanings in the evaluative domain. In a second step, the analysis of adjectives is used to propose an alternative definition of deontic modality, which covers both the meanings of verbs and adjectives, and which can deal with the different extensions towards modal and non-modal categories. This is integrated into a conceptual map, which works both in diachrony – defining pathways of change – and in synchrony – accommodating refinements within each set of meanings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper describes a system of ergative marking in Umpithamu (Cape York Peninsula, Australia), in which the use of the ergative marker is determined by a combination of principles of animacy and information structure. Inanimate transitive subjects receive obligatory ergative marking, whereas animate transitive subjects only receive ergative marking when they are in focus, defined here as a principle of local prominence. Further evidence for this analysis is provided by showing that the principles governing optional ergative marking also govern other aspects of morphosyntactic organization, specifically the position of pronouns and the marking of objects. The system in Umpithamu is compared with other optional ergative systems in Australia, and it is shown that the principle of local prominence is unusual, with most other languages relying on more global, episode-level types of prominence. This also has a number of theoretical implications, including the need to recognize different construction types in applying rules for case marking in transitive clauses, and the challenge of mixed categories to the modular organization of grammatical models. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

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]

This article analyses the interaction between semantic and pragmatic information in illocution and focus marking in Umpithamu (Cape York, Australia), and it uses these data to argue that while FDG can deal with the basics of the semantics-pragmatics interface, it lacks three crucial features to represent the interaction between semantic and pragmatic information in an adequate way. The marking of illocution illustrates the importance of preferred interpretations that are halfway between encoded and incidental aspects of interpretation, driven by general pragmatic principles. While such preferred interpretations are crucial from the perspective of diachrony and language processing, they do not have a clear place in the FDG model. The marking of focus illustrates the existence of categories in the case system that combine interpersonal and representational aspects of organization in a nonarbitrary way, which can form a diachronic pathway between the interpersonal and the representational levels. While the synchronically dual nature of categories is easy to represent in FDG, the nonarbitrary link between the two functions, and its potential diachronic consequences, do not have an obvious place in the model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper is a cross-linguistic study of counterfactuality in simple clauses, as in the English construction The police should have intervened. On the basis of a representative sample of languages, we investigate (i) how counterfactuality is most commonly marked, and (ii) what these patterns of marking can tell us about the nature and origins of counterfactuality. We first show that counterfactuality is most frequently marked by a combination of elements that have other functions in other contexts, rather than by one single ‘dedicated’ marker. Contrary to popular belief, neither past tense nor imperfective aspect is a universal feature in the combinations of markers used to signal counterfactuality: the only type of element that is found in every combination is a modal element marking some type of potentiality, which can be combined (i) with past-tense markers, (ii) with a combination of past tense and aspectual (perfect or perfective) markers, or (iii) just with aspectual markers. On the basis of these findings about the marking of counterfactuality, we argue that counterfactuality typically originates as a semanticization of pragmatic information, more specifically an implicature derived from the compositional meaning of a combination of a modal element and a past, perfect or perfective element. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This study analyses a case of parallel grammaticalization in five genetically related languages, with a lexical source meaning ‘person’ developing to a grammatical function of reflexive marking. Although not typologically unusual, this case is special because, in spite of the overall parallelism, the resulting reflexive markers are located in different parts of the system, either as free or clitic elements associated with a lexical object position, or as bound elements within the morphology of the pronouns. It is shown that this morphosyntactic divergence can be attributed to differences in the organization of the wider grammatical system, more specifically the availability of a number of constructions with pronouns. More generally, this is used as a case study to argue that cross-linguistic studies of grammaticalization should take into account the wider grammatical system in which developments take place, and focus on the morphosyntactic details of the path leading to the grammatical target, in addition to semantic and pragmatic relations between source and target. It is shown that even in the absence of genuine diachronic material, detailed comparison of grammatical systems can uncover systemic factors that motivate morphosyntactic divergence. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This study argues that constructions of purpose, reason and intended endpoint have a special status in typologies of complex sentences, because they combine features of the adverbial domain and the complement domain. The feature they share with adverbial clauses is that they do not function as the object of the predicate of the main clause, but instead elaborate on its circumstances. The feature they share with complement clauses is that unlike other adverbial clauses they specify the mental state of some participant in the main clause, typically the agent. Evidence for this special status comes from two sources. On the one hand, it is shown that the recognition of a mental state relation is necessary in semantic terms, to distinguish the three constructions from semantically similar types in the adverbial domain, and to explain their exceptional behavior in terms of presupposition. On the other hand, it is also shown that the presence of such a mental state relation is crosslinguistically reflected in the formal make-up of the three construction types, specifically in the use of mood markers in the dependent clause, and in the use of conjunctions that are shared with the domain of represented speech. From a theoretical perspective, the intermediate status of constructions of purpose, reason and intended endpoint is important because it provides structural evidence for layered models of clause structure, specifically for the distinction between a description-related and an interaction-related layer of organization, and for a further subdivision of the interaction-related layer in terms of modal and illocutionary features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study provides a linguistic perspective on the structure and the interpretation of a key historical narrative in Umpithamu (a Pama-Nyungan language of Cape York Peninsula, Australia), against the background of a larger corpus of narrative texts in Umpithamu. The analysis focuses on the role of participant tracking devices in the macro-structure of the narrative, and the role of case marking in the build-up of narrative motifs. It is argued not only that marked types of participant tracking serve to mark the boundaries of episodes, as often noted in the literature, but also that some types have additional functions within episodes, which leads to a proposal for refinement of Fox's (1987) Principle of Morphosyntactic Markedness. On a micro-structural level, it is shown how a rare system of case marking is used by the narrator to construe white-Aboriginal interactions as events in which the Aboriginal participants experience an extreme lack of control. [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.

In this study, we argue that the increasingly popular concept of subjectivity is in need of a more fine-grained analysis, and we make an attempt to set up a typology of distinct sub-categories. We first discuss a number of problems that emerge from the literature, such as the conflicting views on the nature of subjectivity, and the general vagueness of the way speaker-involvement is defined in order to detect subjectivity. On the basis of two case studies, we then propose to distinguish between at least three types of subjectivity, one pragmatic type relating to the use of an expression, and two semantic types where speaker-involvement pertains to the meaning of an expression. The distinction between the latter two types is based on syntactic criteria, and semantically relates to whether a particular item functions in the build-up of the content of a message, or in the enactment of the speaker's position with respect to this content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Abstract: This paper argues that scalar quantity implicatures do not work across the modal domain as a whole, as has traditionally been assumed in the literature, but that deontic modal expressions pose a specific problem for the mechanism of scalar implicatures. It is argued that the problems with deontic modality are due to the fact that expressions of permission and obligation are different on two dimensions: they do not just express weaker and stronger commitment to desirability on the part of some authority, but they also carry different presuppositions about the willingness of the modal agent (the person who is allowed or obliged to do something) to carry out the action in question. The consequence of this difference is that the two types, unlike their epistemic counterparts, do not form a perfect scale. They differ in more respects than just modal strength, and this disrupts the implicature mechanism that works well for the weaker and stronger degrees of epistemic modality. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper investigates a system of composite mood marking in the non-Pama-Nyungan languages of northern Australia, which generally mark modal meanings through combinations of prefixes and suffixes of the finite verb. The analysis focuses on the category of irrealis, which is typically marked with a specific prefix, and covers both meanings of counterfactuality (when combined with a past tense suffix) and of potentiality (when combined with non-past tense suffixes). The central problem in describing this category, as with irrealis categories more generally, is how to reconcile the feature of non-actualization found in the counterfactual uses with the feature of potentiality found in all other uses (including the counterfactual one). On the basis of the formal systematics of prefix-suffix combinations, as well as the internal semantic structure of counterfactual constructions, it is shown that non-actualization can be derived from past potentiality by general Gricean principles. In addition, this analysis suggests that some exceptional non-Pama-Nyungan systems that do not have an irrealis prefix can be diachronically related to the basic system with an irrealis prefix. The analysis proposed has implications for the more general typology of irrealis categories and for their relation with negation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues for a constructional approach to the analysis of coordination in English, with comparative evidence from a number of other Germanic languages. The analysis of coordination proposed here is functionally based on the notion of illocutionary force and formally reflected in the behavior of the basic clause types (declarative-imperative-interrogative) in the clauses that make up the coordinate construction. On the one hand, it is argued that this approach can help to explain why traditional syntactic criteria like clause order and word order can be used to distinguish coordinate constructions from subordinate ones, and that it can easily handle cases where one conjunction allows both coordinate and subordinate construal. On the other hand, it is argued that this approach also allows one to make a subdivision within the coordinate category depending on the presence or absence of restrictions in illocution type for the second member of the coordinate construction, and that this subdivision allows for a principled account of other features which subdivide the coordinate domain, like subject ellipsis and use in conjoining non-clausal categories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study argues that adverbial clauses in initial position constitute a distinct construction type within the domain of clause combining in English, and that their specific constructional features can help to explain the often-observed correlation between initial position,discourse-organizing function and subordination. Specifically, it is argued that initial adverbial clauses can be characterized in terms of two constructional parameters, one relating to the internal structure of the adverbial clause, and another relating to its status with respect to the main clause. It is shown that these features can explain why initial position typically goes hand in hand with discourse-organizing function and why it can be used as a criterion for subordinate status. In addition, it is also shown that this approach can provide descriptive corrections to a number of traditional views, such as the assumed general correlation between final position and local function, and the apparently conflicting definitions of subordination in terms of relative prominence and integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents an introduction to the February 2004 issue of the journal "Functions of Language."