Overcoming linguistic taboos: Lessons from Australia
Wednesday, December 11, 2013 - 18:10
in Paleontology & Archaeology
Grammar is sometimes shaped by restrictions on language use. This is the key finding of a new study to be published in the December issue of the scholarly journal Language, demonstrating how taboos can bring on changes to language structures. The paper, "Preference organization driving structuration: Evidence from Australian Aboriginal Interaction for pragmatically motivated grammaticalization" is authored by Joe Blythe of the University of Melbourne, Australia, and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.