TY - JOUR
T1 - Past marking in Australian Aboriginal English on Croker Island: local versus cross-variety patterns and principles
AU - Hackert, Stephanie
AU - Laliberté, Catherine
AU - Mailhammer, Robert
AU - Wengler, Diana
AU - Zeidan, Ronia
PY - 2025
Y1 - 2025
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Australian Aboriginal English
KW - creole
KW - habituality
KW - Lexical Aspect Hypothesis
KW - mixed models
KW - persistence
KW - preverbal bin
KW - random forests
KW - second-language acquisition
KW - stativity
KW - syllable-final consonant cluster reduction
KW - variable past inflection
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85213946012&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1177/00754242241298990
DO - 10.1177/00754242241298990
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85213946012
SN - 0075-4242
JO - Journal of English Linguistics
JF - Journal of English Linguistics
ER -