Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 October 2005
R. M. W. Dixon, Australian Languages: Their nature and development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xlii, 734. Hb $95.00.
Australian languages is a typological approach to the description and historical study of the Aboriginal languages of Australia. Together with its planned companion volume, Australian languages: A complete catalogue, a collection of sketches of some 250 languages, it is intended to present non-Australianist scholars with comprehensive information about Aboriginal languages and to offer specialists a summary and an agenda for future research. There are 14 chapters: “The language situation in Australia,” “Modelling the language situation,” “Overview,” “Vocabulary,” “Case and other nominal suffixes,” “Verbs,” “Pronouns,” “Bound pronouns,” “Prefixing and fusion,” “Generic nouns, classifiers, genders and noun classes,” “Ergative/accusative morphological and syntactic profiles,” “Phonology,” “Genetic subgroups and small linguistic areas,” and “Summary and conclusion.”