Professor Bill Palmer

Australian Indigenous languages are widely cited as depending overwhelmingly on abstract cardinal terms for spatial reference. However, considerable under-recognized diversity exists, with systems invoking aspects of local topography or egocentric projections. The first step toward an empirically grounded understanding of the wider implications of Australian spatial reference systems is to establish what components of spatial systems actually occur in what combinations across the continent. This article examines the spatial systems of five Australian languages to test hypotheses about the role of the environment in shaping linguistic representations of space, revealing under-recognized aspects of Australian systems, including the use of egocentric ("relative") reference frame but only on the sagittal axis; a nearside-farside system; and multiple systems invoking diverse salient environmental features.

In many Oceanic languages the "indirect" possessive construction, which is typically associated with alienable possession, uses special forms to host person and number agreement indexing the possessor. This can be contrasted with the "direct" possessive construction, typically associated with inalienable possession, where a lexical possessum noun itself carries possessor-indexing agreement. The host forms used in the indirect construction are often referred to as "classifiers." We argue that this term should not be applied to indirect possession marking in many Oceanic languages, and present evidence to show that indirect possessor-indexing hosts in such languages do not have the properties typically associated with classifiers. In contrast with this, we further argue that these indirect possessor-indexing hosts should be treated as the syntactic head of the noun phrase in which they occur, thereby allowing treatment of the syntax of NPs with indirect possession that is consistent with those with direct marking. In both instances, the person and number indexing morphology simply attaches to the syntactic head. © by University of Hawai'i Press. All rights reserved.

Torau displays a highly complex system of aspect, tense, and modal marking. One of the most complex elements of this system is the marking of imperfective aspect. Imperfective in Torau is marked by a construction employing a choice of two overt imperfective markers and the possible presence of reduplication. The range of imperfective semantics encoded by this construction varies widely, encompassing progressive, habitual, persistive, and progressive inchoative or inceptive. Which reading is given depends not only on the choice of imperfective marker and the presence or absence of reduplication, but on a complex interplay of these factors with other aspectual, modal, or tense marking, and the aspectual semantics of the verb itself. This paper teases apart each of these highly interdependent factors to determine the independent functional characteristics of each imperfective marker and of reduplication. © by University of Hawai'i Press. All rights reserved.

This paper examines the phenomenon of voiceless sonorants in Kokota (Oceanic, Solomon Islands). The phonemic status of these phones is examined in terms of the question¿are they underlyingly phonemes, or the result of the synchronic surface coalescence of underlying /h/ plus sonorant clusters? The relevant data from Kokota are presented, then two alternative models are briefly described¿underlying voiceless sonorant phonemes in Iaai, and the surface coalescence of CC sequences in Lenakel.1 Evidence from within Kokota is then examined in an attempt to determine which model Kokota best fits. The paper concludes that these Kokota phones represent underlying voiceless sonorant phonemes, giving the language a consonant phoneme inventory in which every voiced phoneme has a voiceless counterpart. © 1999, Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.