Fellowship focus: Tracing the evolution of verb forms in Western Desert languages of Australia.
Small differences in verb forms, as if people said ‘clean-ed’, ‘clean-ed-ed’, ‘clen-t’ and ‘clen-t-ed’ within close geographical locations, show how languages change and develop over time. Expressing a past tense meaning twice in the same word may seem unnecessary, but such extra endings can actually help make a language easier to learn and use. This idea is related to the Paradigm Cell-Filling Problem (PCFP), which looks at how speakers predict unknown word forms. This Fellowship will study the issue by examining verb patterns in twelve closely related Western Desert languages. The project will explore how verb systems are structured and how different cues contribute to the PCFP, increasing our understanding of this language family, with broader implications for historical linguistics, and theories of both the PCFP and ‘redundant’ suffixes.