The timing of this workshop is linked to (a) an inter-disciplinary workshop KIMBERLEY POINTS: AN ARCHAEOLOGY-LINGUISTICS WORKSHOP 20-22 January 2015, Australian National University, organised by Patrick McConvell and Tim Maloney, and (b) the presence in Canberra of Luisa Miceli in January.

Two recent publications give an overview of the state of the art of Australian comparative linguistics: Koch (2014) on Australian languages in general and Miceli (2015) on the Pama-Nyungan family. A recent study by Bowern and Atkinson (2012) proposes for the first time a higher-level subgrouping for the Pama-Nyungan languages. A newish research project by Mark Harvey and Robert Mailhammer is further researching the relationships between the Australian languages. Meanwhile, recent work by Ellison and Miceli explores the implications of transmission that takes place among non-monolingual speakers. Furthermore, François and Kalyan offers a model for representing genealogical relations that don’t fit into a neat family tree structure (see François 2015)

In the light of these recent overviews, plus the research desiderata mentioned in Koch et al. (2014), it is worth reflecting on what further progress can be made in reconstruction and classification among the Australian languages.

This half-day workshop discusses some of these issues, which we hope will serve to advance knowledge of Australian comparative linguistics—focussing both on methods and on the interpretation of data.

Presentations

1:30 Luisa Miceli (UWA): The Pama-Nyungan family: history and issues

1:55 Mark Ellison (ANU): A Cognitive Model of Bilingual-Lead Differentiation and Convergence

2:40 Luisa Miceli(UWA): Looking for evidence of an anti-doppel bias in the Pilbara

3:15 Tea break

3:35 Harold Koch and Siva Kalyan (ANU): Advances in western Pama-Nyungan subgrouping based on shared innovations

4:30 Robert Mailhammer (UWS) and Mark Harvey UNewcastle): Reconstructing Proto-Australian bottom up: towards Proto-Iwaidjan and beyond

5:00 General discussion

5:30 Close

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