John Mansfield
Anthropological Linguistics
I am interested in linguistic diversity across several dimensions: grammatical structure, semantics, phonology and pragmatics. My first experience with linguistics involved learning Murrinhpatha, an Aboriginal language of northern Australia. This taught me to recognise and value the remarkable differences between human languages, and suggested to me that these may be tied to equally striking differences in cultural contexts and interactional norms.
My current research focuses on modelling some aspects of language change, in ways that I hope will shed light on the mechanisms of language diversification via the pathways of communication, culture and cognition.
I also contribute to social development goals for the communities who generously share their languages with me. Here is some information about a joint-advocacy meeting I helped organise for Aboriginal people in the “Top End” of Australia in 2022:
ZORA Publication List
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Publications
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A Simple Explanation for Harmonic Word Order. Cognitive Science, 49(4):e70056.
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Managing expectations: Referential expectedness and uncertainty in a syntactically flexible language. Studies in Language:online.
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Morphology. In: Frank, Michael C; Majid, Asifa. Open Encyclopaedia of Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, online.
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Stylised sustained prosody in three Australian languages. In: Speech Prosody 2024, Leiden, the Netherlands, 2 July 2024 - 5 July 2024. Speech Prosody Special Interest Group (SProSIG), 980-984.
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Vowel predictability and omission in Anindilyakwa. In: Kim, Ji Yea; Miatto, Veronica; Petrovic, Andrija; Repetti, Lori. Epenthesis and beyond: Recent approaches to insertion in phonology and its interfaces. Berlin: Language Science Press, 57-84.
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Naturalness is gradient in morphological paradigms: Evidence from positional splits. Glossa, 8(1):online.
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Category Clustering and Morphological Learning. Cognitive Science, 46(2):e13107.
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Category clustering: A probabilistic bias in the morphology of verbal agreement marking. Language, 96(2):255-293.
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Cell Wall Damage-Induced Lignin Biosynthesis Is Regulated by a Reactive Oxygen Species- and Jasmonic Acid-Dependent Process in Arabidopsis. Plant Physiology, 156(3):1364-1374.