25.5051, Diss: Anthropological Linguistics, Morphology, Phonology, Sociolinguistics: Mansfield: 'Polysynthetic Sociolinguistics: The Language and Culture of Murrinh Patha Youth'

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LINGUIST List: Vol-25-5051. Thu Dec 11 2014. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 25.5051, Diss: Anthropological Linguistics, Morphology, Phonology, Sociolinguistics: Mansfield: 'Polysynthetic Sociolinguistics: The Language and Culture of Murrinh Patha Youth'

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Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2014 23:14:56
From: John Mansfield [jbmansfield at gmail.com]
Subject: Polysynthetic Sociolinguistics: The Language and Culture of Murrinh Patha Youth

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Institution: Australian National University 
Program: School of Language Studies, Faculty of Arts 
Dissertation Status: Completed 
Degree Date: 2014 

Author: John Basil Mansfield

Dissertation Title: Polysynthetic Sociolinguistics: The Language and Culture of 
Murrinh Patha Youth 

Dissertation URL:  https://www.academia.edu/9080041/

Linguistic Field(s): Anthropological Linguistics
                     Morphology
                     Phonology
                     Sociolinguistics


Dissertation Director(s):
Michael Walsh
Linda Barwick
Jane H. Simpson
James A. Walker

Dissertation Abstract:

This thesis is about the life and language of kardu kigay – young Aboriginal
men in the town of Wadeye, northern Australia. Kigay have attained some
notoriety within Australia for their participation in “heavy metal gangs”,
which periodically cause havoc in the town. But within Australianist
linguistics circles, they are additionally known for speaking Murrinh Patha, a
polysynthetic language that has a number of unique grammatical structures, and
which is one of the few Aboriginal languages still being learnt by children.
My core interest is to understand how people’s lives shape their language, and
how their language shapes their lives. In this thesis these interests are
focused around the following research goals:
- To document the social structures of kigay’s day-to-day lives, including the
subcultural “metal gang” dimension of their sociality;
- To document the language that kigay speak, focusing in particular in aspects
of their speech that differ from what has been documented in previous
descriptions of Murrinh Patha;
- To analyse which features of kigay speech might be socially salient
linguistic markers, and which are more likely to reflect processes of
grammatical change that run below the level of social or cognitive salience;
- To analyse how kigay speech compares to other youth Aboriginal language
varieties documented in northern Australia, and argue that together these can
be described as a phenomenon of linguistic urbanisation.
I will show that the “heavy metal gangs” are an idiosyncratic local subculture
that uses foreign heavy metal bands as group totems. Social connections and
loyalties are formed on the basis of peer solidarity, as opposed to the
traditional totemic system, which is structured around ancestry. Lives are now
shaped by the dense (and often conflict-riven) town environment, as opposed to
bush life, which was inseparable from the land. 
Kigay’s in-group language is a “slang” variety of Murrinh Patha (MP), which
deploys new words and phrases by borrowing and reinterpreting English
vocabulary. It is also characterised by substantial lenitions and deletions in
the pronunciation. The MP grammatical system still underlies this speech, but
some of its more complex morphosyntactic forms are restricted to the “heavy”
speech of older people, and there are various mergers and reconfigurations
occurring in the verb morphology.
This thesis adds to the growing body of work describing how language contact
and changing sociolinguistic dynamics are radically restructuring the
linguistic repertoire of Aboriginal communities in northern and central
Australia. At the same time, it is one of very few studies providing
sociolinguistic description of a polysynthetic language, and is therefore an
innovative study in polysynthetic sociolinguistics.







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