Professor Mark Donohue
Mark Donohue working with Selfius,
an Ansus speaker from west Yapen, Indonesia
Background
I am primarily a syntactician (who remains firmly grounded in phonetics and phonology), who becomes interested in relationships (both historical and typological) between the languages which I work on. Since my field area is focussed on the Indonesian/New Guinea area, this is where I have investigated linguistic history and linguistic contact. Initially working on language relationships in Southeast Sulawesi, I have also investigated Austronesian relationships and historical phonology in Flores and northern New Guinea, as well as working on the historical and genetic relationships of the non-Austronesian languages of the Timor-Alor-Pantar group, the Skou family, and the Yawa family withing West-Papuan, and that group more generally. I have published articles and chapters representing some of the results of his comparative work, and continue to document the linguistic prehistory of many lesser-known language areas, including a possible link between Australia’s Cape York and some languages of South-west New Guinea and the evidence for a large area in Western Insular Melanesian Papuan. If I ever get the time, I intend to finish his monograph on the use of lexical transitivity patterns as a comparative tool.
My linguistic specialisations include Phonology, Morphology and Syntax; Comparative linguistics, typology, and the linguistic macro-history of insular Southeast Asia, descriptive linguists, Austronesian and Papuan linguistics, and the interaction of language contact and anthropology.
Research Areas
- Austronesian (especially languages of the Indonesian area) and Papuan languages;
- morphology and syntax;
- phonology, especially things relating to tonology, syllable structure and epenthesis;
- typology;
- the impact of semantics on morphological coding and syntactic choices;
- the impact of discourse pragmatics on syntactic coding choices;
- grammaticalisation;
Contact
Prof. Mark Donohue
Linguistics Program
School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics
Building 11
Monash University
Victoria 3800
Australia
Ph: +61 (3) 9905 0703
Fax: +61 (3) 9905 5437
Email: Mark.Donohue@arts.monash.edu.au
Selected Publications
2007. Complex predicates and bipartite stems in Skou. Studies in Language.
2006. Negative grammatical functions in Skou. Language 82 (2): 383-398.
2005. Configurationality in the languages of New Guinea. Australian Journal of Linguistics 25 (2): 181-218.
2004. Voice oppositions without voice morphology. In Paul Law, ed., Proceedings of AFLA 11, ZAS, Berlin 2004. ZAS Papers in Linguistics Nr. 34 – October 2004: 73-88. Berlin: Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Typologie und Universalienforschung, Berlin.
2003. Agreement in the Skou language: a historical account. Oceanic Linguistics 42 (2): 479-498.
2002. Which sounds change: descent and borrowing in the Skou family. Oceanic Linguistics 41 (1): 157-207.
2001. Coding choices in argument structure: Austronesian applicatives in texts. Studies in Language 25 (2): 217-254.
2000. with Kersti Börjars, Much ado about nothing: features and zeroes in Germanic noun phrases. Studia Linguistica 54 (3): 309-353.
1999. A grammar of Tukang Besi. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
1998. Transitivity in Tukang Besi. Studies in Language 22 (1): 83-111.
1997. Tone in New Guinea. Linguistic Typology 1 (3): 347-386.
1996. Bajau, a symmetrical Austronesian language. Language 72 (4): 782-793.