Middle Clarence dialects of Bandjalang, especially Waalubal; phonology; morphology; syntax; dialect geography; Waalubal texts and translations; Waalubal - English lexicon together with semantic index (thesaurus)

Published version appears as appendix to The middle Clarence dialects of Bandjalang, by T. Crowley, q.v. for annotation.

This book is the first full evaluation of the Proto-Australian hypothesis, which proposes that most Australian languages have a common ancestor: Proto-Australian [PA]. Using the standard methodologies of historical linguistics, the authors show that nearly all Australian languages descend from PA. Given that PA was a single language, it was spoken only in a small area of Australia. Its descendants have spread across the continent. Current theories of language spread do not offer clear motivations for large-scale spread in hunter-gatherer economies. This raises significant questions for analyses of Australian prehistory and archaeology specifically, and more widely for general theories of hunter-gatherer prehistory and language spread.

The first European chroniclers of Indigenous Culture in Australia looked for the sensational, often neglecting its more significant features. In his fourth book on Queensland’s early history, J. G. Steele corrects this imbalance with a detailed account of the Indigenous people of the subtropical coast at the time of their earliest contact with white settlers. The region described is centred on Brisbane, extending along the coast to Fraser Island, to Evens Head in New South Wales, and inland to the Great Dividing Range. Drawing on early accounts, photographs, place-names, languages, legends, archeology, and museum collections, Aboriginal Pathways provides a wealth of fascinating and important material, much of it relevant to debates on Indigenous land rights and sacred sites of the 1980s.

The Oxford Handbook of Derivational Morphology is intended as a companion volume to The Oxford Handbook of Compounding (OUP 2009) Written by distinguished scholars, its 41 chapters aim to provide a comprehensive and thorough overview of the study of derivational morphology. The handbook begins with an overview and a consideration of definitional matters, distinguishing derivation from inflection on the one hand and compounding on the other. From a formal perspective, the handbook treats affixation (prefixation, suffixation, infixation, circumfixation, etc.), conversion, reduplication, root and pattern and other templatic processes, as well as prosodic and subtractive means of forming new words. From a semantic perspective, it looks at the processes that form various types of adjectives, adverbs, nouns, and verbs, as well as evaluatives and the rarer processes that form function words. The book also surveys derivation in fifteen language families that are widely dispersed in terms of both geographical location and typological characteristics.

This book shows that every language has an adjective class and examines how these vary in size and character. The opening chapter considers current generalizations about the nature and classification of adjectives and sets out the cross-linguistic parameters of their variation. Thirteen chapters then explore adjective classes in languages from North, Central and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. Studies of well-known languages such as Russian, Japanese, Korean and Lao are juxtaposed with the languages of small hunter-gatherer and slash-and-burn agriculturalist groups. All are based on fine-grained field research. The nature and typology of adjective classes are then reconsidered in the conclusion. This pioneering work shows, among other things, that the grammatical properties of the adjective class may be similar to nouns or verbs or both or neither; that some languages have two kinds of adjectives, one hard to distinguish from nouns and the other from verbs; that the adjective class can sometimes be large and open, and in other cases small and closed. The book will interest scholars and advanced students of language typology and of the syntax and semantics of adjectives. Each book in this series focuses on an aspect of language that is of current theoretical interest and for which there has not previously or recently been any full-scale cross-linguistic study. The series is for typologists, fieldworkers, and theory developers at graduate level and above. The books will be suited for use as the basis for advanced seminars and courses. The subjects of next three volumes will be serial verb constructions, complementation, and grammars in contact.