Past marking in Australian Aboriginal English on Croker Island: local versus cross-variety patterns and principles

Stephanie Hackert, Catherine Laliberté, Robert Mailhammer, Diana Wengler, Ronia Zeidan

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate variable past marking in Australian Aboriginal English as spoken on Croker Island, Northern Territory. Employing data from twenty speakers and both mixed-effects regression and random forests, we show that despite a high degree of individual variability the occurrence or non-occurrence of a past-marked verb is subject to conditioning factors that are known from other varieties of English, most notably lexical and grammatical aspect and marker persistence. Moreover, the constraints governing the preverbal marker bin relate in systematic ways to those governing inflection. Our results suggest that the specifics of contact influence may be less relevant to explaining variable linguistic processes such as past marking than more general discourse-pragmatic and cognitive principles of language variation and change. This has implications for the debate about the uniqueness of creole languages, which have often been considered a language type like no other.

Original languageEnglish
Number of pages31
JournalJournal of English Linguistics
DOIs
Publication statusE-pub ahead of print (In Press) - 2025

Keywords

  • Australian Aboriginal English
  • creole
  • habituality
  • Lexical Aspect Hypothesis
  • mixed models
  • persistence
  • preverbal bin
  • random forests
  • second-language acquisition
  • stativity
  • syllable-final consonant cluster reduction
  • variable past inflection

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