Publications

Browne, M. (2024). A grammar of Warlmanpa. ANU Press. https://doi.org/10.22459/GW.2024

Browne, M., Proctor, M., Simpson, J., Harvey, M., Mailhammer, R., & Carpenter, H. (2024). Stop Oppositions in Warumungu: A Distributional and Acoustic Analysis. In Proceedings of the Nineteenth Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology, edited by Olga Maxwell and Rikke Bundgaard-Nielsen, 117–21. Melbourne: University of Melbourne, 2024 https://assta.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Proceedings-of-the-of-19th-Australasian-International-Conference-on-Speech-Science-and-Technology-1.pdf

Warumungu is a language of Central Australia with a reported contrast for stops. There has been no formal distributional or acoustic analysis of this contrast; this study addresses this gap. Analysis of 439 stops produced by three speakers reveals that the consistent phonetic correlates of the manner contrast are duration and voicing. The primary distinction in stop manner is duration; voicing distinctions are predictable from duration.

Browne, M., Creed, A., Ingold, J., Presbitero, A., Gregersen, C.G., Rose, M., & Whettam, L. (2023). “Strength, pride, hope, care”: Employment Pathways for First Nations Peoples and Communities of Djilang (Geelong) Action Research Final Report. Department of Jobs, Skills, Industry and Regions. Victoria: Victoria State Government. ISBN: 0730001792.

Ennever, T., & Browne, M. (2023). Cross-referencing of non-subject arguments in Pama-Nyungan languages. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 43(1). https://doi.org/10.1080/07268602.2023.2217412

About one third of the Pama-Nyungan languages of Australia employ pronominal cross-referencing, yet systematic typological patterns of non-subject argument registration remain unexamined. We analyze this variation from two perspectives by surveying 22 Pama-Nyungan languages. Firstly, we survey which kinds of case-marked arguments can be cross-referenced by these pronominal systems. From this perspective, we find that a number of nominal expressions marked with so-called ‘local’ cases (e.g. locative, allative, ablative, etc.) can be cross-referenced when instantiating certain argument relations. Secondly, we find striking cross-linguistic predictability in how such relations, which we descriptively group as ‘locational’, are morphologically integrated into the pronominal paradigms. We show that the variation can be captured by two major parameters: firstly, whether locational cross-referencing utilizes the same form as another non-subject series, or whether locational cross-referencing is serviced by a unique series formally built off another non-subject series. In this latter case there is further variation as to which other non-subject series provides the base for the dedicated locational series. These parameters result in six surface pattern types, and we show that each of the patterns is instantiated in languages of the survey.

Meakins, F., Ennever, T., Osgarby, D., Browne, M., & Hamilton-Hollaway, A. (2023). Ngumpin-Yapa languages. In C. Bowern (Ed.), The Oxford Guide to Australian Languages (pp. 918-932). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Browne, M. (2021). A Grammatical Description of Warlmanpa, a Ngumpin-Yapa Language Spoken around Tennant Creek (Northern Territory). PhD Thesis, University of Queensland. https://doi.org/10.14264/d0fcbc2.

This was my PhD thesis, which has been superceded by the published monograph.

Browne, M. (2021). On the integration of dative adjuncts into event structures in Yapa languages. Languages, 6(1). https://doi.org/10.3390/languages6030136.

Warlpiri and Warlmanpa (Ngumpin-Yapa languages of Australia) exhibit a complex predicate construction in which a class of preverbs introduces a single argument that is not shared by the argument structure of the inflecting verb, nor is there necessarily any shared event structure. This is problematic for many theories of linking structures of complex predicates, since no arguments or events are shared between the predicative elements of the complex predicate. The same grammatical relation is instantiated by a beneficiary adjunct.

In light of new research in event and argument structure, I propose a lexical rule which introduces an applicative argument to account for the beneficiary construction; and that the preverbs take another predicate as one of their arguments to account for the complex predicates. The applicative rule and the preverbs both introduce an argument of the same grammatical relation, leading to interesting interactions, given that two grammatical relations of the same type are not expected to co-occur within a single clause.

San, N., Bartelds, M., Browne, M., Clifford, L., Gibson, F., Mansfield, J., Nash, D., Simpson, J., Turpin, M., Vollmer, M., Wilmoth, S., & Jurafsky, D. (2021). Leveraging pre-trained representations to improve access to untranscribed speech from endangered languages. In 2021 IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop (ASRU) (pp. 1094-1101). IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/ASRU51503.2021.9688301.

Pre-trained speech representations like wav2vec 2.0 are a powerful tool for automatic speech recognition (ASR). Yet many endangered languages lack sufficient data for pre-training such models, or are predominantly oral vernaculars without a standardised writing system, precluding fine-tuning. Query-by-example spoken term detection (QbE-STD) offers an alternative for iteratively indexing untranscribed speech corpora by locating spoken query terms. Using data from 7 Australian Aboriginal languages and a regional variety of Dutch, all of which are endangered or vulnerable, we show that QbE-STD can be improved by leveraging representations developed for ASR (wav2vec 2.0: the English monolingual model and XLSR53 multilingual model). Surprisingly, the English model outperformed the multilingual model on 4 Australian language datasets, raising questions around how to optimally leverage self-supervised speech representations for QbE-STD.

Nevertheless, we find that wav2vec 2.0 representations (either English or XLSR53) offer large improvements (56-86% relative) over state-of-the-art approaches on our endangered language datasets.

Browne, M. (2020). Contrast and retroactive implicatures: an analysis of =lku ‘now, then’ in Warlpiri and Warlmanpa. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 40(2). https://doi.org/10.1080/07268602.2020.1753651.

The clitic =lku in Warlpiri and Warlmanpa (Ngumpin-Yapa, Pama-Nyungan, Australia) has been previously analyzed as a ‘change of state’ marker indicating some proposition is false at an earlier time, and true at a later time. In this paper, I examine a number of uses of =lku, which require expanding and refining the ‘change of state’ analysis, in order to argue for a new analysis of =lku as a temporal and discourse clitic. The temporal function locates the event or state being modified by =lku in the temporal consequence of another event or state. This function interacts with lexical aspect, triggering an inference of the cessation of an ongoing state or event, if there is one, and encoding the inception of the state or event being modified by =lku. The discourse use of =lku frames new information which should be evaluated against the ongoing discourse. I also demonstrate some striking cross-linguistic similarities, showing that temporal morphemes commonly interact with discourse structure, just as =lku does in Warlpiri and Warlmanpa.

Browne, M. (collector), 2016. Warlmanpa corpus. Collection WRL1 at catalog.paradisec.org.au [Open Access]. https://dx.doi.org/10.26278/FW4K-F911.