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What Warlpiri 'avoidance' registers do with grammar
... As well as in avoiding direct reference in language, it is sometimes also required for a taboo pair to avoid one another spatially as well, as is the rule between mother-in-law and son-in-law in Warlpiri communities (Laughren 2001: 200). Different registers are further used by speakers when referring to these taboo relations, ranging from the alteration of vocabulary to, in extreme cases of avoidance, the manipulation of cases such as the locative in order to produce a maximally distant reference to the relative in question (Laughren 2001). Across the Australian continent, there were also vast networks of communication and trade between different Aboriginal nations. ...
This dissertation investigates the Verb Phrase of Kununurra Kriol, an English-lexified Creole language spoken in Kununurra, Western Australia. Following important sociolinguistic and historic context for the language, four key morphosyntactic features are analysed and discussed in depth. These features in focus include borrowing and code-switching practices, transitivity, passive constructions, and Serial Verb Constructions. I find that continued contact with the substrate traditional language, Miriwoong, has shaped many features of the grammar of Kununurra Kriol. Miriwoong influence is especially manifested in code-switching and borrowing of Miriwoong coverbs, but also has shaped conceptualisations of transitivity in the language. Concurrently, Kununurra Kriol shows independent developments connected to neither substrate nor superstrate, such as the development of passive constructions and Serial Verb Constructions. This dissertation demonstrates Kununurra Kriol to be distinct from other varieties of Australian Kriol, with its own grammatical properties and cultural identity. At the same time, Kununurra Kriol possesses many features held to be in common with Creole languages around the world, providing some validation to the typological category.
... (Treis 2008: 331-2, adapted) Lastly, languages can also have distinct honorification strategies operating in tandem, each reserved for different interactional contexts. Exemplifying this is Warlpiri (Laughren 2001), where honorific plural and honorific third person are both active. The strategy of honorific third person is used only if the interaction is taking place within a ceremonial context; for example, in initiation rituals, where boys are initiated into manhood. ...
Honorifics are grammaticalized reflexes of politeness, often recruiting existing featural values (e.g. French recruits plural vous for polite address, and German, third person plural Sie). This paper aims to derive their cross-linguistic distribution and interpretation without [hon], an analytical feature present since Corbett (2000). The striking generalization that emerges from a cross-linguistic survey of 120 languages is that only certain featural values are ever recruited for honorification: plural, third person, and indefinite. I show that these values are precisely those which are semantically unmarked, or presuppositionless, allowing the speaker to consider an interlocutor’s negative face (Brown and Levinson 1978). I propose an alternative analysis based on the interaction between semantic markedness, an avoidance-based pragmatic maxim called the Taboo of Directness, and Maximize Presupposition! (Heim 1991) to derive honorific meaning.
... Australian kinship systems are classificatory, in that all persons are included in a relationship class that (potentially) contains members consanguineally (or by adoption) related to Ego (see Scheffler [1978] for relevant discussion). The system of kin relation terms is based on combinations of the two basic relationships: maternal and paternal (Laughren 1982(Laughren , 2001. Further distinctions may be lexically marked with respect to ascending versus descending relationships, sex, seniority within sibling sets in the harmonic (Ego's and Ego's grandparents and grandchildren) and disharmonic (Ego's parents and Ego's children) generation moieties. ...
... The primary meaning of kunkurrng is associated with the special register of constrained language used between WM and DH. 'Mother-in-law' or 'avoidance' registers in Australian Aboriginal languages have been the subject of a number of studies (e.g., Dixon 1972Dixon , 1980Haviland 1979;Harris 1970;Laughren 2001;McConvell 1982;Rumsey 1982). Like many of the avoidance styles in such studies, kun-kurrng involves extensive lexical replacement of nouns, verbs and adjectives with alternative forms, and avoids direct address as well as other circumlocutory stylistic features. ...
The classical joking relationship has fascinated anthropologists for decades, especially in relation to African societies. The existence of joking relationships in Aboriginal Australia has also been noted in ethnographies, but rarely described in a way that acknowledges that kinship-mediated humour can actually be creative and funny. Kinship is obviously central to an understanding of these relationships, but the institutions that engender joking relationships have (surprisingly) rarely been discussed in detail for any Australian Aboriginal group. Taking the Bininj Kunwok and Dalabon-speaking peoples of western Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory as a case study, I seek to demonstrate a generalisation that, in this part of Australia, joking relationships index the absence of actual affinity. The pretentious bluster, vulgarity and teasing of joking relationships ironically echo appropriate ways of behaving with actual affines. Whereas respect and avoidance are the hallmarks of interaction between actual affines, one jokes with a class of potential affines with whom actual affinity is not envisaged or has been renounced. The two forms of behaviour are intimately linked. Respect for affines is the default form of behaviour and the markedness of the departure from this expectation in joking relationships signals the existence of a different type of affinal relationship.
The Person-Case Constraint (PCC) has played a substantial role in the development of linguistic theory in recent decades, particularly with respect to agreement and the encoding of person (Anagnostopoulou 2017b and references therein). While much of the generative literature on the PCC advances or assumes a (mor-pho)syntactic agreement-based account of PCC effects, we provide novel evidence from polite pronouns that challenges this perspective. Polite pronouns have the useful property that they exhibit a striking "mismatch" between the features expressed in their agreement and in their forms on the one hand, and what is interpreted on the other. They therefore provide an ideal testing ground for the predictions of morphosyntactic analyses of the PCC, which predict that third-person polite pronouns used for addressees should behave like other third-person arguments and should therefore fail to give rise to PCC effects. We find that this prediction is falsified in Italian for the polite pronoun LEI, which is used for formal address but is grammatically third-person, and for which PCC effects obtain; we make related observations for the related person-hierarchy effect connected to the so-called Fancy Constraint (Postal 1989). We suggest that the PCC pattern with polite pronouns is more consistent with a syntacticosemantic, interpretation-based account of the PCC, such as that of Pancheva and Zubizarreta (2018), and sketch how this can be captured in their system. Lastly, we identify cross-linguistic expectations for ditransitives vs. other person-hierarchy effects with polite pronouns, and show how these expectations are borne out for Spanish USTED and German SIE.
This contribution is the introduction for the special issue of Gesture entitled “Anthropology of Gesture”. As such, it raises two main questions: how do gestures contribute to the field of anthropology? And, inversely, how anthropology can improve our understanding of gesture and gestural behaviours? Of particular importance for this special issue, is the emphasis on what Lempert called “the anthropological sensibility” which aims at taking a more cultural and ethnographic approach to the study of gesture, especially but not only in cross-cultural contexts. The last part of this introduction presents all the contributions of this special issue.
In Australian Indigenous societies the means for demonstrating kinship-based respect are rich and varied, and mastery of their ideological and contextual dimensions is highly valued and an indication of communicative expertise. Special speech registers, sometimes referred to as ‘mother-in-law’, ‘brother-in-law’, or ‘avoidance’ languages, are one aspect of this complexity. Another dimension of respect is afforded by Australian Indigenous sign languages, used in contexts where speech itself is disallowed as well as in everyday interactions where signing is practical and useful. What is lacking from the majority of accounts of these special semiotic repertoires is an investigation of the ways that speech and communicative actions, such as sign or gesture, may work together in such contexts. Also neglected is the possibility that the articulation of signs and gestures may be modified to indicate a respectful stance towards avoided kin. Drawing on both archival sources and recent fieldwork, this paper delineates some of the articulatory dimensions of signs and gestures used in this domain.
The morphosyntactic, semantic, and phonological properties of Warlpiri verbs have been investigated by a number of scholars including Hale (1982, 1983), Hale, Laughren, and Simpson (1995), Harvey and Baker (2005), Laughren (1988, 1992), Legate (2002, 2003, 2008), Levin (1983), Nash (1982, 1986), Reimer (2002, 2003, 2008), and Simpson (1991, 2002). This study will focus on that part of the verbal complex which I will refer to as the ‘thematic core’. It minimally consists of a thematic verb (V) which may be augmented by a non-inflecting preverbal (PV) element of a class which, following Nash 1982, I will refer to as ‘lexical’: [(PV lexical])=V], or by PVs derived from other phrasal categories. I will argue that the thematic core of the larger verbal constituent ‘maps onto’ an event structure which represents its predicate argument structure (PAS) and its Aktionsart properties. This study investigates the relationship between the PV and V forms which instantiate the thematic core, from the perspective of their individual and combined contribution to the underlying event structure. It also compares the event structure of ‘heavy verbs’ (HV) with their ‘light verb’ (LV) homophones, and also with synonymous PV-LV complex verbs.
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