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The Dyirbal Language of North Queensland
Originally published in 1972, this study is dedicated to the surviving speakers of the Dyirbal, Giramay and Mamu dialects. For more than ten thousand years they lived in harmony with each other and with their environment. Over one hundred years ago many of them were shot and poisoned by European invaders. Those allowed to survive have been barely tolerated tenants on their own lands, and have had their beliefs, habits and language help up to ridicule and scorn. In the last decade they have seen their remaining forests taken and cleared by an American company, with the destruction of sites whose remembered antiquity is many thousands of years older than the furthest event in the shallow history of their desecrators. The survivors of the three tribes have stood up to these diversities with dignity and humour. They continue to look forward to the day when they may again be allowed to live in peaceful possession of some of their own lands, and may be accorded a respect that they have been denied, but which they have been forcibly made to accord to others.
Young People's Dyirbal
In 1972 when R. M. W. Dixon's classic grammar, The Dyirbal Language of North Queensland, was published, under thirty speakers of the 'traditional' language remained. Now only some of their children and grandchildren use the language; these younger people speak a simplified version. In this impressive empirical survey, Annette Schmidt analyses the changes that have taken place in the Dyirbal spoken by that last generation of its speakers at the levels of phonology, morphology, syntax, the lexicon and semantics. She also provides a detailed account of the socio-linguistic setting of the community and the attitudes towards Dyirbal among younger speakers, their elders and English speakers.
Language
'Language: The Basics', gently introduces beginning students and general readers to the study of language. Written in an engaging and entertaining style, this book provides a clear overview of the key topics and an explanation of the basic terms and ideas.
A New Grammar of Dyirbal
R. M. W. Dixon's landmark 1972 grammar of the Dyirbal language of North Queensland is one of the best-known and most widely-cited language descriptions in the history of linguistics. In the fifty years since its publication, Dixon has continued his detailed work on the language, extending and refining the descriptions in light of more recent theoretical advances. The resulting A New Grammar of Dyirbal offers a comprehensive contemporary grammar of the language, reanalysed in myriad ways and drawing on an extensive corpus of texts. Among its many new features are further discussion of the applicative/causative derivation; a fresh focus on the role of the pervasive 'pivot', the syntactic linking of S and O functions; a detailed account of the two antipassives and their semantic contrast and phonological conditioning; and an extended account of relative clauses. The volume is accompanied by a companion website hosting the full set of textual data on which the grammar is based, as well as a thesaurus/dictionary of nouns, adjectives, and verbs across ten dialects of Dyirbal.
Edible Gender, Mother-in-law Style, and Other Grammatical Wonders
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.
Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things
"Its publication should be a major event for cognitive linguistics and should pose a major challenge for cognitive science. In addition, it should have repercussions in a variety of disciplines, ranging from anthropology and psychology to epistemology and the philosophy of science. . . . Lakoff asks: What do categories of language and thought reveal about the human mind? Offering both general theory and minute details, Lakoff shows that categories reveal a great deal."—David E. Leary, American Scientist
Concise Encyclopedia of Languages of the World
Concise Encyclopedia of Languages of the World is an authoritative single-volume reference resource comprehensively describing the major languages and language families of the world. It will provide full descriptions of the phonology, semantics, morphology, and syntax of the world's major languages, giving insights into their structure, history and development, sounds, meaning, structure, and language family, thereby both highlighting their diversity for comparative study, and contextualizing them according to their genetic relationships and regional distribution.Based on the highly acclaimed and award-winning Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, this volume will provide an edited colle...
A Grammar of Yidin
Professor Dixon examines the grammar of Yidin, an Australian dying language, through phonology, syntax and of a 'mixed ergative' type that cannot easily be accommodated in terms of standard syntactic theory.
Ergativity
Although there is only one ergative language in Europe (Basque), perhaps one-quarter of the world's languages show ergative properties, and pose considerable difficulties for many current linguistic theories. R. M. W. Dixon here provides a full survey of the various types of ergativity, looking at the ways they interrelate, their semantic bases and their role in the organisation of discourse. Ergativity stems from R. M. W. Dixon's long-standing interest in the topic, and in particular from his seminal 1979 paper in Language. It includes a rich collection of data from a large number of the world's languages. Comprehensive, clear and insightful, it will be the standard point of reference for all those interested in the topic.
Are Some Languages Better Than Others?
This book sets out to answer a question that many linguists have been hesitant to ask: are some languages better than others? Written in the author's usual accessible and engaging style, the book outlines the essential and optional features of language, before concluding that the ideal language does not and probably never will exist.
