Papers by Madeleine Clews
Australian Journal of Linguistics, Jan 17, 2022
ABSTRACT The quotative system – lexical and morphosyntactic strategies for the direct reporting o... more ABSTRACT The quotative system – lexical and morphosyntactic strategies for the direct reporting of speech and thought – has undergone a major transformation in mainstream World Englishes. Diachronic studies of quotation in Australian, British, Canadian and New Zealand English have all documented the same trends: a relatively stable system, using a small number of quotative variants, becomes more varied and complex, with a decline in the frequency of canonical say correlating with an increasing tendency to quote thought. This study, modelled on two foregoing sociolinguistic analyses of mainstream West Australian and New Zealand Englishes, examines quotation in recordings of 26 speakers of Australian Aboriginal English born between 1907 and 1961, including 16 oral histories. The results indicate that, unlike their settler English-speaking counterparts, these speakers have not only preserved the dominance of say: they have come to use it in distinctive ways, with semantic and grammatical innovations not observed in other varieties, in a system which serves to enrich narrative in a speaker population unique for its millennia of oral tradition. The findings suggest processes of grammaticalization and, observed alongside similar expanding frequency and versatility of be like in mainstream Englishes, may signal a parallel evolutive effect in a different language ecology.
TESOL in context, Dec 30, 2020
Language Variation and Change
We examine constructed dialogue in a longitudinal corpus of Australian Aboriginal English (AE) sp... more We examine constructed dialogue in a longitudinal corpus of Australian Aboriginal English (AE) spoken in Perth, Australia. We conduct a variationist analysis of naturalistic data from forty-six L1 speakers of AE born 1907–2005. We ask, regarding the use of quotative frames, whether AE has changed in line with settler colonial Englishes. We examine whether a division of labor exists in the use of quotative frames, and whether the rise of first-person-marked internal thought reporting attested in settler colonial Englishes is present in AE.Our statistical modeling shows functional partitioning in how quotative frames are used, with AE speakers strongly encoding direct speech across time. We find that the rise of first-person-marked internal thought reporting has not been systemic in AE. Despite be like's incursion after 1983, the underlying system of AE has not changed. The cultural prerogative to encode speech remains strong despite sustained contact with non-First Nations Austra...
Language Variation and Change, Aug 3, 2023
We examine constructed dialogue in a longitudinal corpus of Australian Aboriginal English (AE) sp... more We examine constructed dialogue in a longitudinal corpus of Australian Aboriginal English (AE) spoken in Perth, Australia. We conduct a variationist analysis of naturalistic data from forty-six L1 speakers of AE born 1907-2005. We ask, regarding the use of quotative frames, whether AE has changed in line with settler colonial Englishes. We examine whether a division of labor exists in the use of quotative frames, and whether the rise of first-personmarked internal thought reporting attested in settler colonial Englishes is present in AE. Our statistical modeling shows functional partitioning in how quotative frames are used, with AE speakers strongly encoding direct speech across time. We find that the rise of first-person-marked internal thought reporting has not been systemic in AE. Despite be like's incursion after 1983, the underlying system of AE has not changed. The cultural prerogative to encode speech remains strong despite sustained contact with non-First Nations Australia.
Australian Journal of Linguistics
TESOL in Context
AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINAL ENGLISH: CHANGE AND CONTINUITY IN AN ADOPTED LANGUAGEMalcolm, Ian G.Series:... more AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINAL ENGLISH: CHANGE AND CONTINUITY IN AN ADOPTED LANGUAGEMalcolm, Ian G.Series: Dialects of English, Series editors: Joan C. Beal, Karen P. Corrigan, Bernd Kortmann, Volume: 16.Boston: De Gruyter, Inc., 2017
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Papers by Madeleine Clews