News & Events

Explorations in the Archival Semantics of Australian Languages (Colloquium)

Claire Bowern

Yale University

Dewey 1101 Auditorium

In this talk I review work on negation and related topics in the compositional semantics of Australian languages, particularly Bardi (Nyulnyulan). I begin with a few important methodological questions: is it possible to do semantic analyses of languages in the absence of field studies? How can we investigate grammatical topics of interest in the absence of overt discussion of those topics in reference grammars, or previous analytical work? and thirdly, how can we combine evidence from language documentation, language change, and linguistic theory to contribute to a more cross-linguistic understanding of semantic patterns? In exploring these questions, I use a case study of a recently concluded National Science Foundation grant on the semantics of negation across time and space. Using a combination of archival data, secondary analyses and fieldwork, this project looks at the domain of negation to reconstruct negative meanings across Pama-Nyungan and to better understand the relationship between negation and the semantics of degree.