Mark Donohue | Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages (original) (raw)

Papers by Mark Donohue

CSLI Publications eBooks, 2007

Publikationsansicht. 36080884. The Tukang Besi language of southeast Sulawesi, Indonesia (1995). ... more Publikationsansicht. 36080884. The Tukang Besi language of southeast Sulawesi, Indonesia (1995). Donohue, Mark. Details der Publikation. Archiv, NDLTD Union Catalog (United States). Keywords, Tukangbesi language Grammar. Sprache, Englisch. Verknüpfungen, ANU. ...

Oxford University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2020

Linguistics Society of Nepal. The Journal's web site is located at http://www.digitalhimalaya.com/collections/journals/nepling/, 2019

Studies in Language, 1998

The Tukang Besi language does not appear to display a clear distinction between transitive and in... more The Tukang Besi language does not appear to display a clear distinction between transitive and intransitive clauses, as transitive verbs are freely able to appear without any overt object and degrees of intransitivity are to be found in the language. The ground between transitive and intransitive contains several points of interest in that eight different degrees of transitivity can be morphologically defined in the one language, allowing us to test the relative rankings of Hopper and Thompson's criteria for transitivity.

De Gruyter eBooks, May 5, 2011

Himalayan linguistics, Feb 25, 2023

This paper presents a synoptic account of verbal suffixation in the Ura dialect of Bumthang, a la... more This paper presents a synoptic account of verbal suffixation in the Ura dialect of Bumthang, a language of central Bhutan. Examining verbal allomorphy shows the persistence of exceptions to historical sound changes in contemporary allophonic and allomorphic processes, and reveals striking contrasts with the culturally dominant Tibetic languages of the area. We examine the ways in which some of the allomorphy is motivated by patterns seen in the phonology of the language more widely, while some of the changes reflect purely (arbitrary) morphophonological processes.

Archaeology in Oceania

ABSTRACTIn this review of the Dark Emu debate we start out by summarising Bruce Pascoe's orig... more ABSTRACTIn this review of the Dark Emu debate we start out by summarising Bruce Pascoe's original work and Peter Sutton and Keryn Walshe's critique. However, the majority of this contribution is to place this Australian‐focussed debate into broader conceptual, methodological and evidential contexts generally associated with the investigation of early agriculture in other parts of the world. If we are to apply the term “agriculture” to Aboriginal plant management practices, then this requires a global, rather than a continental‐centric comparative perspective. We argue debates regarding the character of plant exploitation practices on the Australian mainland, including whether they included forms of agriculture or experimental horticulture, have been hindered by a lack of terminological clarity, the absence of a methodological framework to assess empirically verifiable evidence, and – even more problematically – a lack of relevant data on the putative plants and practices inv...

Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 2022

The terminology and definitions for farmers, foragers and those who undertake in-between subsiste... more The terminology and definitions for farmers, foragers and those who undertake in-between subsistence strategies have attracted recurrent debate by archaeologists, anthropologists, geographers and others. These debates are plagued by semantic and conceptual confusions in terms of the definitions proffered to the ‘middle ground’ between foragers and farmers, as well as in terms of how categories are applied in the past and the present. In broad terms, perspectives diverge between considering the adoption of agriculture to be an ‘all-or-nothing’ commitment or a continuum representing various types of ‘middle ground’. A careful unpacking of data from traditional societies in Murdock’s Ethnographic Atlas reveals geographical structuring of the global dataset, as well as considerable differences based on local crop assemblages. In sum, agro-pastoral, cereal-based societies in Africa and Eurasia exhibit a stronger tendency with respect to subsistence dependence on farming, while soci- eties in North America and those reliant on root crops and arboriculture in the wet tropics tend more towards a ‘middle ground’ that incorporates aspects of farming without abandoning foraging.

Archaeology in Oceania, 2023

In this review of the Dark Emu debate we start out by summarising Bruce Pascoe's original work an... more In this review of the Dark Emu debate we start out by summarising Bruce Pascoe's original work and Peter Sutton and Keryn Walshe's critique. However, the majority of this contribution is to place this Australian-focussed debate into broader conceptual, methodological and evidential contexts generally associated with the investigation of early agriculture in other parts of the world. If we are to apply the term "agriculture" to Aboriginal plant management practices, then this requires a global, rather than a continental-centric comparative perspective. We argue debates regarding the character of plant exploitation practices on the Australian mainland, including whether they included forms of agriculture or experimental horticulture, have been hindered by a lack of terminological clarity, the absence of a methodological framework to assess empirically verifiable evidence, and-even more problematically-a lack of relevant data on the putative plants and practices involved. Here, terminology is clarified and a bottom-up, practice-based method is advocated for the assessment of recent (using oral, visual and written histories) and ancient (using archaeological, archaeobotanical and palaeoecological evidence) forms of food plant exploitation in Australia. The terminology and methodological framework are heuristically applied to three scenarios: (1) ethnographic and historical records for the exploitation of underground storage organs (USOs) on the Australian mainland; (2) historical documentation regarding the botany, potential human roles in dispersal, and Aboriginal exploitation of banana (Musa spp.), taro (Colocasia esculenta) and greater yam (Dioscorea alata) in northern Australia and (3) archaeobotanical evidence for the exploitation of USOs and other plants from The Top End.

Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 2021

Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads, 2023

We examine a database of 3089 languages coded for 351 morphosyntactic features, including almost ... more We examine a database of 3089 languages coded for 351 morphosyntactic features, including almost all of the morphosyntactic features found in The World Atlas of Language Structures (Dryer & Haspelmath 2013). We apply Factor Analysis of Mixed Data, and determine that the main dimensions of global morphological variation involve (1) word order in clauses and adpositional phrases, (2) head- versus dependent-marking, and (3) a set of features that show an east-west distribution. We find roughly the same features clustering in similar dimensions when we examine individual macro-areas, thus confirming the universal relevance of these groupings of features, as encapsulated in well-known implicational universals. This study confirms established insights in linguistic typology, extending earlier research to a much larger set of languages, and uncovers a number of areal patterns in the data.

Routledge eBooks, Jun 27, 2023

New Guinea is home to 0.2% of the world’s population, in 0.2% of the world’s land area, with 18% ... more New Guinea is home to 0.2% of the world’s population, in 0.2% of the world’s land area, with 18% of the world’s languages, belonging to at least 50 families (Foley, 2000). The largest language in the area, Enga, has less than 200,000 speakers; the smallest known stable, non-endangered language situation is Masep, which has not been demonstrated to be related to any other languages, and has had a population of less than 40 speakers for over 60 years (Clouse et al., 2002). Politically the region is split into two, with the eastern half the territory of Papua New Guinea, independent since 1975, and the western half formerly being a Dutch territory, but Indonesian since annexation in 1961; each half has its own national language(s). In addition to the baseline complexity that such a linguistically diverse environment guarantees, the island has been subject to four different colonial administrations, each with their own official languages (Dutch and Malay, and later Indonesian in the west, German and later English in the east), and has generated three pidgins/creoles that have achieved widespread use in different areas (local Malay varieties in the west, Tok Pisin varieties in most of the east and Hiri Motu in the south half of the east), as well as the official languages.

370 Dwinelle: Languages of Southeast AsiaWe address the question of the categoriality of Southeas... more 370 Dwinelle: Languages of Southeast AsiaWe address the question of the categoriality of Southeast Asia as a linguistic area by examining a language that can be argued to be on its very fringe, Iha. Iha is spoken on the western edge of New Guinea, and participates in many ways in the typological norms of the New Guinea mainland. It is, however, very much an outlier in the linguistic milieu in which it is found, with a number of languages of the Onin peninsula showing characteristics more typical of (mainland) Southeast Asia; indeed, in some ways even Iha shows features that would be at home in Southeast Asia. We discuss the linguistic features that have been used to characterise Southeast Asia as a linguistic area, and compare their distribution across the archipelago that separates Iha from the Asian mainland. We discuss the need to examine different kinds of features separately: different kinds of linguistic features (reflecting different social interactions) will have their own histories