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The Languages of Australia
Open accessAbstract
Described by Ken Hale as 'nothing less than a masterpiece' and by P. H. Matthews as 'absolutely clear, astonishingly complete, factually fascinating', The Languages of Australia (first published in 1980 and now reissued) was a landmark in Australian linguistics. This pioneering work of synthesis covered more than two hundred Aboriginal languages, and stimulated the next generation of scholarship in the field. The author's subsequent search for an overarching theoretical model to explain the unusual properties of Australian languages finally led him to adopt a 'punctuated equilibrium' model of language development. Dixon proposed this in The Rise and Fall of Languages (1997), which provided the framework for his major work Australian Languages: Their Nature and Development (2002). The Languages of Australia is still sought after, however, as a benchmark in the discipline and because its first four chapters provide a valuable non-technical introduction that does not appear in the 2002 volume.
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Citations
Cited by
Levinson, S. C. (1987) · Journal of Linguistics · doi:10.1017/s0022226700011324 · Cited by 423
On the Origin of Internal Structure of Word Forms
MacNeilage, P. F., & Davis, B. L. (2000) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.288.5465.527 · Cited by 355
Non-configurationality in Australian aboriginal languages
Austin, P., & Bresnan, J. (1996) · Natural Language and Linguistic Theory · doi:10.1007/bf00133684 · Cited by 337
Peopling of Sahul: mtDNA Variation in Aboriginal Australian and Papua New Guinean Populations
Redd, A. J., & Stoneking, M. (1999) · The American Journal of Human Genetics · doi:10.1086/302533 · Cited by 91
Reassessing Australia’s Linguistic Prehistory
Clendon, M. (2006) · Current Anthropology · doi:10.1086/497671 · Cited by 18
Metadata
- Authors
- Dixon, R. M. W.
- Venue
- Cambridge University Press eBooks
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press
- Published
- 2011-01-20
- OpenAlex
- W2022325188
- Cited by
- 430
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 27.06
- Type
- book
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
