Table of Contents

1: Background
Part I: Genders and Classifiers
2: Edible and the other genders in Dyirbal
3: Classifiers in Yidiñ
Part II: Kin Relations and How to Talk with Them
4: The Dyirbal kinship system
5: Jalnguy, the 'mother-in-law' speech style, in Dyirbal
6: The origin of 'mother-in-law' vocabulary in Dyirbal and Yidiñ
Part III: Grammatical Studies
7: Comparing the syntactic orientations of Dyirbal and Yidi
8: Serial verb constructions in Dyirbal
9: Complementation strategies in Dyirbal
10: Grammatical reanalysis in Warrgamay
Part IV: Variation, Contact, and Change
11: Dyirbal grammar: Variation across dialects
12: Dyirbal dialectology: Lexical Variation
13: Compensatory phonological changes
14: A study of language contact
Part V: Languages Fading Away
15: The last change in Yidiñ
16: The gradual decline of Dyirbal

About the Author

R. M. W. Dixon is Adjunct Professor and Deputy Director of the Language and Culture Research Centre at James Cook University. He has published grammars of a number of Australian languages (including Dyirbal and Yidiñ), in addition to A Grammar of Boumaa Fijian (University of Chicago Press, 1988), The Jarawara Language of Southern Amazonia (OUP, 2004; paperback 2011), and A Semantic Approach to English Grammar (OUP, 2005). His
theoretical works include Where have All the Adjectives Gone? And other Essays on Semantics and Syntax (De Gruyter, 1982), Ergativity (CUP, 1994), the three volume work Basic Linguistic Theory (OUP, 2010-12) and most recently Making New
Words: Morphological Derivation in English (OUP 2014).

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