Brett's Web Page

Brett Baker

Senior Lecturer in Linguistics

School of Behavioural, Cognitive and Social Sciences

University of New England, NSW 2351 Australia

Ph: +61 2 6773 3220; Fx: +61 2 6773 3748

To contact me via electronic mail, use my first name followed by my second name and separated by a dot, then the 'at' symbol then une dot edu dot au.

Downloadable papers:

Morphology/phonology

'Word Structure in Ngalakgan'. 1999. (PhD thesis) (Much revised version now published as Word structure in Ngalakgan by CSLI, Stanford, 2008). See also the cover art (from a painting by Alawa man Willie Gudabi and Ngalakgan woman Moima Willie, design by Damon Baker).

'Vowel harmony, directionality and morpheme structure constraints in Warlpiri.' Lingua. Vol 115/10: 1457-1474.

'Word structure in Australian languages' (with Mark Harvey). 2003. (Draft version of the paper published in the Australian Journal of Linguistics 23, 1:3-34.)

'Evidence for the sub-group Ngalakgan-Rembarrnga within Gunwinyguan'(Long version of a paper presented at the 25th International Conference of Historical Linguistics, Melbourne, 2001. Now published as 'Stem forms and paradigm reshaping in Gunwinyguan.' In Claire Bowern and Harold Koch (eds) Subgrouping in Australian languages. 2004. John Benjamins. 313-340.)

Appendices:

1. Ngalakgan-Rembarrnga verb paradigms

2. Ngandi-Nunggubuyu verb paradigms

3. Ngkn-Rmba-Ngdi pronominal prefixes

'Noun class disagreement in Ngalakgan'. 2002. (Draft of a paper published in a special volume of Sprachtypologie und Forschungen 'Problems of Polysynthesis', ed. by Nick Evans and Hans-Juergen Sasse. Akademie Verlag: Berlin.)

The domain of phonological processes. 2005. In Ilana Mushin (ed.) Proceedings of the 2004 Conference of the Australian Linguistics Society. http://dspace.library.usyd.edu.au:8080/handle/123456789/97

Referentiality

'Ethnoclassification and the environment in Northern Australia.' In Schalley, Andrea C. and Khlentzos, Drew (eds.): 'Mental states, vol. 2: Language and cognitive structure'. [Studies in Language Companion Series 93.] Benjamins. Pp. 239-265.
'I'm going to where her backbone is: placenames in the Roper'. 2002. (Draft version of chapter published in 'The Land is a Map' edited by Luise Hercus, Flavia Hodges, and Jane Simpson. Pacific Linguistics: Canberra.)

'The interpretation of complex nominal expressions in two Northern Australian languages'. 2004. (Draft of a paper now published in a collected volume 'Discourse and grammar in Australian languages' (Ilana Mushin & Brett Baker, eds, 2008, John Benjamins. Studies in Language Companion Series 104 )

Word structure in Ngalakgan is the first major theoretical work on the phonology and morphology of an Australian language in 20 years. Ngalakgan is a non-configurational, polysynthetic, and agglutinative language of the Gunwinyguan family. The morphological structures of Ngalakgan require a two-level analysis: ROOT-level and WORD-level. Only the WORD-level shows regular phonologically conditioned alternations. The ROOT-level is entirely frozen. Baker demonstrates that Optimality Theory must take account of differences in the productivity of morphological relations in the input, in order to maintain the simplest analysis. Ngalakgan has a quantity-sensitive stress system which is hitherto undescribed and which contradicts the predictions of current Moraic Theory. Syllables closed by codas which share place with a following onset do not count as heavy even though heterorganic codas do. The same system is found in neighbouring languages. This and other patterns suggest that syllabification in these languages is gesture-, rather than timing-, based.

Current research

Further Reading

Useful Links

Curriculum Vitae

My life

I live in Armidale NSW with my wife Karan and our sons Louie (born October 8th, 2004) and Jem (November 13th, 2008). Since February 2002 I've been teaching in the Linguistics discipline in the School of Behavioural, Cognitive and Social Sciences (Linguistics was formerly part of the School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics—now defunct), University of New England. Units I have taught: LING360/460 Generative Syntax, LING368/468 Formal Phonology, LING365/465 Phonetics and Phonology, LING369/469 Morphology and Syntax, LING100/101/102/450 (introductory first year units), LING306 and LING464 First language acquisition, LING307 Second language acquisition, LING313 Language description, LING330 Language in multilingual societies. Graduate seminars in Lexical-Functional Grammar, Linguistics of Australian Languages, Modern Formal Theories of Grammar, Language Description and Linguistic Typology, and others.

Current research

Coverbs and complex predicates

I began this ARC-funded project in 2005 in collaboration with Mengistu Amberber (UNSW) and Mark Harvey (Newcastle). In 2006 we held a workshop in conjunction with the annual Australian Linguistics Society conference. A collected volume with the title 'Complex predicates: a cross-linguistic perspective on event structure' (Mengistu Amberber, Brett Baker, Mark Harvey, eds.) will be published imminently by Cambridge University Press.

Referentiality in Australian languages

This is a issue which has concerned me for a long time but I'm only now starting to understand the theory behind the questions. For my preliminary ideas on this topic, see the papers above. I am primarily investigating these issues in the Non-Pama-Nyungan languages Wubuy (a.k.a. Nunggubuyu) and Marra (a.k.a. Mara). See map, below, for locations.

Research on Discourse and Definiteness

The Australian Linguistic Society annual conference 2007 hosted a workshop on 'Definiteness'. Lesley Stirling (UMelb) and I are currently working on the thorny issue of whether Australian languages have a well-defined class of determiners, and what the functions are of such items.

Audio-text linking online

This is a continuation of my postdoctoral fellowship at Sydney University, awarded in 1999 under the Australian Research Council's 'Strategic Partnerships with Industry, Research and Training' (SPIRT) scheme. The project was called 'Indigenous spoken interaction — research and application'. My industry partner was Diwurruwurru-jaru Aboriginal Corporation (DAC; the Katherine Language Centre), with whom I've had a long and productive association.

The project aims to take an electronic approach to the issue of how best to present and archive indigenous language so that the focus is less on the written word, and more on spoken, interactive material.

To this end, I have been working with speakers of indigenous languages in the Roper River area collecting interactive material (dialogues, collaborative discussions and stories, traditional uses for plants and animals, arguments, gossip) with the aim of creating an electronic audio archive which can be accessed through a database including dictionary and text components.

This tool ideally can be used both as a language archive, to store language material for future use, and as a resource for teaching indigenous languages in schools.

In its involvement with language teaching in schools, DAC has continually run into the problem of low literacy abilities among the (usually elderly) people who volunteer as language experts in the classroom.

The archive, with its emphasis on audio material, aims to alleviate this problem, without providing necessarily the best answer. The 'research' component of this project will focus on the formal and referential characteristics of interactive language, an area which is still poorly represented in the linguistics literature on Australian languages.

Go to: thesis, further reading, other links, back to the top.

Go to: current work, thesis, bedtime reading, other links, back to the top.

Last updated: 16-March-2009. Comments to my address above.

		Brett Baker
		Senior Lecturer in Linguistics
		School of Behavioural, Cognitive and Social Sciences
		University of New England, NSW 2351 Australia
		Ph: +61 2 6773 3220; Fx: +61 2 6773 3748
		To contact me via electronic mail, use my first name followed by my second name and separated by a dot, then the 'at' symbol then une dot edu dot au.