Asia-Pacific Language Variation - Volume 1, Issue 2, 2015

Takesi Sibata, the pioneer of sociolinguistic dialectology, anticipated several developments that we now apply internationally in the discipline of sociolinguistics. I outline Professor Sibata’s accomplishments from a Western perspective, but I am mainly interested in promoting wider appreciation of his work in the study of language variation. To do that, I review some of his analyses and show how Professor Sibata developed concepts that persist in contemporary sociolinguistics. I show that, for instance, about fifteen years before the inception of Western sociolinguistics, Professor Sibata was already engaged in studying sound change in apparent time, identifying linguistic innovators, eliciting folk concepts about dialects, and seeking empirical evidence for the critical period in dialect acquisition, as well as other pursuits that are now integral to our discipline.

This is the first quantitative study of bound pronoun variation in an Australian language. Bound pronouns in Gurindji and Bilinarra (Ngumpin-Yapa, Pama-Nyungan) are obligatory for first and second persons, categorically absent for the third person minimal, and used 73% of the time to cross-reference third person non-minimal referents and minimal third person oblique referents. A total of 1095 tokens of referents were coded for three predictors: the grammatical relation of the referent, whether the referent was human and whether a co-referential nominal was also present in the clause. A number of properties of the referent significantly decreased the appearance of a bound pronoun including if the referent was non-human, non-human and an object, or also cross-referenced by a nominal. This variation has a number of implications for the function of bound pronouns in discourse and characterisations of non-configurational languages.

Bound morphology is usually realized on lexical stems following fixed rules of sequencing, but in some highly agglutinative languages this is not the case. Morphotactic variation has previously been described in detail for Chintang and Tagalog, and more briefly noted for various other languages including Udi, Totonac and Athapaskan languages (Bickel et al., 2007; Harris, 2002; McFarland, 2009; Rice, 2000; Ryan, 2010). I here report another case of variable ordering, in Murrinhpatha, spoken in northern Australia. I argue that in this case the variable ordering of verb suffixes reflects change in progress in the morphological structure of the verb, and the dynamic nature of prosodic domains in this language. I also note that in Chintang, Udi and Murrinhpatha, morphotactic variation is associated with word-like prosodic domains occurring inside the syntactic verbal word.

The distinction between languages and dialects has remained a controversial issue in literature. When such a distinction is made, it often has far-reaching implications in top-down language promotion and preservation policies that tend to favor only those varieties that are labelled as ‘languages’. This issue is of critical importance for the survival of most sign language varieties in the world from a socio-political point of view. Against this background, this paper discusses how the notions of ‘dialect’ and ‘language’ have been applied in classifying sign languages in the past few decades. In particular, the paper reports on two recent studies which provide linguistic evidence that the signing varieties used by Deaf signers in Jakarta and Yogyakarta in Indonesia should be regarded as distinct sign languages rather than mutually intelligible dialects of Indonesian Sign Language. The evidence comes from significant differences in the lexicon, preferred word order for encoding transitive events, and use of mouth actions. Our result suggests that signing varieties within a country can be significantly different from each other, thus calling for more concerted efforts in documenting and recognizing these differences if the linguistic needs of the signing communities are to be met.