John Mansfield
Prof. Dr. John Mansfield
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
Download Options
Publications
-
Linguistic Diversification and Rates of Change: Insights From a Diverse Sample of Sociolinguistic Studies Language and Linguistics Compass, 19, e70022. https://doi.org/10.1111/lnc3.70022
-
The diachrony of verbal classification: Classifier mergers and semantic incoherence in Southern and Western Daly Diachronica, 42:2, 161–197. https://doi.org/10.1075/dia.24036.man
-
A Simple Explanation for Harmonic Word Order Cognitive Science, 49(4):e70056.
-
Managing expectations: Referential expectedness and uncertainty in a syntactically flexible language Studies in Language:online.
-
Morphology In M. C. Frank & A. Majid (Eds.), Open Encyclopaedia of Cognitive Science (p. online). MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.21428/e2759450.7772416b
-
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.
-
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.
-
Naturalness is gradient in morphological paradigms: Evidence from positional splits Glossa, 8(1):online.
-
Category Clustering and Morphological Learning Cognitive Science, 46(2):e13107.
-
Category clustering: A probabilistic bias in the morphology of verbal agreement marking Language, 96(2):255-293.
-
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.