Alice Gaby
Assistant Professor
Australian languages; language, culture, and cognition; language documentation and description; linguistic typology
Ph.D., Linguistics, University of Melbourne and Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, 2006.
Groups: Syntax & Semantics, Language & Cognition, Fieldwork & Language Documentation
Contact information
Email: agaby@berkeley.edu
Web site: http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~agaby/
Personal statement
I have a healthy obsession with Australian aboriginal languages, and in particular the Paman languages spoken in and around the community of Pormpuraaw (Cape York Peninsula, Australia). My ongoing collaboration with this community has impressed on me the importance of language documentation, especially in contexts of language obsolescence. It has also given me an appreciation of how linguistic analysis can be enriched by acknowledging that grammatical structures are part of a larger communicative system, encompassing multiple languages, registers and modalities. Staunchly empirical in orientation, my research explores the relationship between language, culture and cognition, as well as the range of cross-linguistic variation.Selected publications
Gaby, A. 2009. “The diachrony of Thaayorre ergative morphology”. In McGregor, William and Jean-Christophe Verstraete (eds), Special Issue: Optional ergative marking and its implications for linguistic theory. (proofs)
Gaby, A. 2009. “Teaching & Learning Guide for: Rebuilding Australia's Linguistic Profile – Recent Developments in Research on Australian Aboriginal Languages”. Language and Linguistics Compass. Blackwell, Published Online: Aug 20 2009 4:45AM. DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-818X.2009.00162.x (abstract)
Gaby, A. 2008. “Pragmatically case-marked: non-syntactic functions of the Thaayorre ergative suffix”. In Ilana Mushin and Brett Baker (eds) Discourse and grammar in Australian languages. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. (proofs)
Gaby, A. 2008. “Distinguishing reciprocals from reflexives in Kuuk Thaayorre”. In Ekkehard König and Volker Gast (eds) Reciprocals and reflexives: linguistic and theoretical explorations. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. (proofs)
Gaby, A. 2008. “Gut feelings: locating emotion, life force and intellect in the Thaayorre body”. In Farzad Sharifian, René Dirven and Ning Yu (eds) Body, culture and language: Conceptualizations of internal body organs across cultures and languages. (proofs)
Gaby, A. 2008. “Re-building Australia’s linguistic profile: recent developments in research on Australian aboriginal languages”. Language and Linguistics Compass, 2(1): 211-233. (article)
Gaby, A. 2007. “Describing cutting and breaking events in Kuuk Thaayorre”. Cognitive Linguistics 18(2): 263-272. (article)
Evans, N., A.Gaby and R. Nordlinger. 2007. "Valency mismatches and the coding of reciprocity in Australian languages". Linguistic Typology 11: 543-599. (proofs)
Gaby, A. 2006. A Grammar of Kuuk Thaayorre. Unpublished PhD thesis. Melbourne: University of Melbourne. (.pdf)
Anderson, S., L. Brown, A. Gaby and J. Lecarme 2006. “Life on the edge: there’s morphology there after all”. Lingua e linguaggio, 1. Pp. 33-48. (abstract, proofs)
Gaby, A. 2006. “The Thaayorre ‘true man’: lexicon of the human body in an Australian language”. In Language Sciences, 28(2). Pp. 201-220. (.pdf)
Gaby, A. 2005. “Some participants are more equal than others: case and the composition of arguments in Kuuk Thaayorre”. In Mengistu Amberber and Helen deHoop (eds) Competition and variation in natural languages: the case for case, Amsterdam: Elsevier. Pp. 9-39. (volume webpage)
Gaby, A. Forthcoming-a. “Reciprocal-marked and marked reciprocal events in Kuuk Thaayorre”. In Evans, Nicholas, Alice Gaby, Stephen Levinson and Asifa Majid (eds) Reciprocals Across Languages. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. (draft)
Gaby, A. Forthcoming-b. “The Thaayorre lexicon of putting and taking. In Anetta Kopecka and Bhuvana Narasimhan (eds) Events of “putting” and “taking”: A crosslinguistic perspective. (Typological Studies in Language), Amsterdam: John Benjamins. (draft)