Australian Pama-Nyungan languages: Lineages of early description
About this ebook
This history of the early description of Australian Aboriginal languages traces a developing understanding and ability to describe Australian morphosyntax. Focus on grammatical structures that challenged the classically trained missionary-grammarians – the description of the case systems, ergativity, bound pronouns, and processes of clause subordination – identifies the provenance of analyses, development of descriptive techniques, and paths of intellectual descent. The corpus of early grammatical description written between 1834 and 1910 is identified in Chapter 1. Chapter 2 discusses the philological methodology of retrieving data from these grammars. Chapters 3–10 consider the grammars in an order determined both by chronology and by the region in which the languages were spoken, since colonial borders regulated the development of the three schools of descriptive practice that are found to have developed in the pre-academic era of Australian linguistic description.
About the author
Clara Stockigt’s linguistic research focuses on the history of the description of Australian languages. Her work contributes to the retrieval of grammatical information from nineteenth and early twentieth-century sources, and furthers understanding of the development of ideas about Australian languages within colonial Australia and between Australia and Europe. She is a Research Fellow at the University of Adelaide, and works within native title to retrieve linguistic data from archival sources in order to reconstruct linguistic ecologies at colonisation. Her University of Adelaide doctoral thesis, “Pama-Nyungan morphosyntax: Lineages of early description”, was awarded a 2017 University Doctoral Research medal, and the 2018 Postgraduate Alumni University Medal.
