Publications
In Ono, Yoshi & Sandy Thompson (Eds) (eds.), The pragmatics of ‘Noun Phrase’ across languages: an emergent unit in interaction, 211–235. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/tsl.128
Noun phrases have long been a contested category in studies of Australian language grammars. In this chapter I use a corpus of conversations in the Northern Australian language Garrwa to show how the syntactic and prosodic design of referring expressions consisting of a demonstrative nominal and a common nominal is highly sensitive to the place in and relevance to the unfolding interactional sequence in which the referring expression occurs. In particular, I show that the design of referential nominal expressions in Garrwa conversations display a systematic relationship between more phrase-like constructions and smooth, progressive talk, and less phrase-like formulations and sequential and
topical boundaries.
In Simeon Floyd, Giovanni Rossi & N.J. Enfield (eds.), Getting others to do things: A pragmatic typology of recruitments, 231–280. Berlin: Language Science Press. 10.5281/zenodo.4018382.
This chapter presents a first survey of recruitment moves and their responses in informal face-to-face conversation conducted in the Australian Aboriginal language Murrinhpatha. The systemic nature of the survey reveals a hierarchically governed array of responses, including structurally preferred compliant responses, as well as a range of dispreferred refusal formats, which either overtly or implicitly reject the recruitment proposal.
Language Documentation and Description 17. 134–141. http://www.elpublishing.org/PID/189.
Language Documentation and Description 17. 142-149. http://www.elpublishing.org/PID/190.
Joe Blythe, Rod Gardner, Ilana Mushin, Lesley Stirling (2018)
Research on Language and Social Interaction, 51(2), 145-170. 10.1080/08351813.2018.1449441
Building on earlier Conversation Analytic work on turn-taking and response mobilization, we use video-recorded multiparty conversations to consider in detail how Australian Aboriginal participants in conversation select a next speaker in turns that are grammatically designed as questions. We focus in particular on the role of a range of embodied behaviours, such as gaze direction, body orientation and pointing, to select – or avoid selecting – a next speaker. We use data from four remote Aboriginal communities to also explore the claims from ethnographic research that Aboriginal conversations typically occur in non-focused participation frames. Data are in Murrinhpatha, Garrwa, Gija and Jaru with English translations.