https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4716-2288
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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.
Acknowledgements
The authors are deeply grateful to the communities and individuals who provided the primary data for this study. We also thank historians Dr Denise Cook, Professor Anna Haebich and Bill and Jenny Bunbury for their support in sourcing materials and helping to make appropriate contact with descendants; Freshwater Bay Museum curator Fiona Crossan and Amanda de Cinque at the State Library of Western Australia for facilitating access to the collections in their care; and Professor Stephen Muecke for kindly providing us with recordings from his 1981 thesis.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 Throughout the paper, our examples stem from Australian Aboriginal English corpora collected by, respectively, Madeleine Clews and Celeste Rodríguez Louro/Glenys Collard for their research. The parenthetical information at the end of our examples shows speaker initials, speaker gender and speaker year of birth. Any names included in the examples are pseudonyms. All data were collected with the express consent of the speakers or their descendants or representatives. Unframed quotatives in examples are preceded by the word ‘zero’, in bold text and enclosed in square brackets: [zero].
2 Davydova (Citation2019) has found be like to occur in the quotative repertoire of outer-circle Englishes where it remains second in frequency to say. Interestingly, the shift to thought as content does not appear to align with mainstream Englishes in Davydova’s corpus.
3 We consider that forced language shift to English would have started occurring with the enactment of the Aborigines Act 1905, the State’s first legislation officially authorizing the removal of Aboriginal children from their communities.
4 Word count is based on 1,680 min of recording with an average of 160 words uttered per minute. Average speech rate was used in this calculation because full transcripts were not always available for oral histories. In these cases tokens were extracted directly from audio recordings.
5 Gesture/mimesis was coded where video capture was available. Audio-only material in the corpus was coded ‘n/a’ in this category.
6 Mindful of the concerns expressed by Gaby and Woods (Citation2020, pp. e268–e270), care was taken to ensure that wherever possible the descendants of speakers included in the sample were contacted about this study and gave their in-principle support to the research.
7 Effects were found to be minimal, but we tackle them here for the record. Statistical analysis found a significant correlation between collection type and only two linguistic-internal variables: those of tense and syntactic placement, with yarning sessions slightly more likely to produce uninflected or reduced tense and non-preposed quotative clauses (see §4.5 and §5.3). This is perhaps attributable to Glenys Collard’s presence in the yarning sessions, but not in the oral histories which were collected by non-Indigenous historians.
8 Visual effects were able to be observed in the yarning data (Rodríguez Louro, Citation2018–Citation2022), which were captured on video.
9 In particular, a relatively strong showing of habitual aspect was initially observed anecdotally during data extraction and was expected to correlate to collection type, given that the formal oral history setting would elicit habitual constructions by specifically asking participants to draw on their memory of how life used to be – what Labov (Citation2013, p. 17) refers to as “pseudo-narratives”. However, statistical analysis using Language Variation Suite’s random forest tool (Scrivner & Díaz-Campos, Citationn.d.) failed to find a significant correlation between collection type and aspect. Three of the five examples that appear here are from informal yarning sessions (Rodríguez Louro, Citation2018–Citation2022).
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Notes on contributors
Madeleine Clews
Madeleine Clews is a PhD candidate in Linguistics at the University of Western Australia. Her main interest is historical sociolinguistics, with a particular focus on English in Western Australia. She is currently exploring Western Australian colonial records for evidence of early dialect formation in the context of ‘history from below’.
Celeste Rodríguez Louro
Celeste Rodríguez Louro is a Senior Lecturer and Australian Research Council Fellow in Linguistics at the University of Western Australia. Her research expertise focuses on the quantitative analysis of language variation and change, with particular interest in longitudinal and cross-varietal comparisons of linguistic systems. She is also interested in decolonized and sustainable academic research practice. Her work has appeared in top linguistics journals, including Language, Journal of Sociolinguistics, Language and Linguistics Compass, English World-Wide, English Language and Linguistics and Studies in Language. Celeste is also currently Vice-President of the Australian Linguistic Society.
Glenys Collard
Glenys Collard is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia, a Nyungar matriarch and native speaker of AAE. (The Nyungar people are the First Nations people of Southwest Western Australia.) She has amassed an impressive record of accomplishments in language teaching and learning, curriculum development and education management. She has qualifications in Aboriginal Community Management and Development (Curtin University, 1997) and has chaired multiple state-level and national committees. She has taught workshops to thousands of West Australians and has compiled unique collections for the recording and analysis of Nyungar language and AAE, including recordings of Nyungar language with respected elders in the Nyungar community.