Australian Aboriginal languages have a special place as an outlier' in the typological space, because of their likely isolation from other languages of the world since the first human colonization of Australia 60,000 years ago, and because of the uniquely homogeneous cultural situation that has arisen where a single continent, entirely populated by hunter-gatherers, is occupied entirely by what is likely to be a single language family, although one with a great deal of typological diversity at the grammatical level.

This course will explore a number of issues that Australian Aboriginal languages raise for semantic typology, focussing on questions of the impact of culture, language contact, and language structure on the expression of meaning in linguistic structures (grammatical, lexical, and intonational). To ground participants' understanding of the issues, half of every class will be devoted to the study of a single language - Dalabon, a polysynthetic language of the Gunwinyguan family in Arnhem Land. In the remaining half we will examine a number of topics in the semantic typology of Australian languages, including:

(1) factors influencing semantic typology: culture; 'internal selection' by other grammatical features; impact of areal traditions;

(2) lexical typology - (a) typology of kinship semantics (b) verbs of perception and cognition, (c) verbal classification;

(3) semantic typology of selected grammatical domains: (a) reciprocals; (b) dyadic expressions;

(4) 'internal selection' - the impact of grammatical structure on patterns of polysemy: 'interaction polysemies' and subject/object syncretisms;

(5) typology, intonation and semantics: prosody and quotativity.