Culture, Interaction and Person Reference in an Australian Language

Abstract

The study of person reference stands at the cross-roads of linguistics, anthropology and psychology. As one aspect of an ethnography of communication, this book deals with a single problem — how one knows who is being talked about in conversation — from a rich and varied ethnographic perspective. Through a combination of grammatical agreement and free pronouns, Bininj Gunwok possesses a pronominal system that, according to current theoretical accounts in linguistics, should facilitate clear cut reference. However, the descriptions of Bininj Gunwok conversation in this volume demonstrate that frequently a vast gulf lies between knowing that, say, an object is '3rd singular', and actually knowing who it refers to. Achieving reference to people in Bininj Gunwok can involve a delicate and refined set of calculations which are part of a deliberate and artful way of speaking. Speakers draw on a diverse set of grammatical and lexical devices all underpinned by shared knowledge about a diverse range of social relationships and cultural practices.

Focality and Extension in Kinship: Essays in Memory of Harold W. Scheffler

“…In Garde's data from Bininy Gunwok (again not unfamiliar from many other languages), address (vocative) kin terms can be used as referential too (Garde 2013: 51, reporting a telephone conversation). However, filiocentric changes such as the one found in katya 'brother' > 'son' do not show the same kind of transitional equivalences.…”

“…However, some types of semantic change in kinship terminology do not fit so easily within the framework. I argue here that these may be more tractable if we recognise variation in pragmatic usage of terms, caused by shifts in centricity (Garde 2013;Merlan 1982) as also leading to change in meaning of terms without such obvious evidence of transitional polysemy.…”

Enhancing the Kinship Anthropology of Scheffler with Diachronic Linguistics and Centricity

“…Rather, I propose that the source of the split is in the centricity of the term's use. This may be 'shifting' (Garde 2013) and the diachronic consequence of this may be a loss of the original meaning and replacement by a meaning associated with filiocentricity. The hypothesised process is shown in Figure 32.…”

Genesis of the Trinity: The Convergent Evolution of Trirelational Kinterms

“…Trirelational kinterms, also known as triangular (Evans, Johnson & Kohler 1992;Garde 2002;Heath 1982), triadic (Alpher 1991;Garde 2013Garde , 2014, ternary (Green 1998;McGregor 1996) and shared (McConvell 1982;O'Grady & Mooney 1973) kinterms, are typologically unusual among the world's languages. These complex items are not unique to Australia and have also been attested in the Brazilian Amazon (Lea 2004) and Patagonia (Evans, Golluscio & Mellico 2010).…”