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Assistant Professor

• Fields of Study

  • Mixed Languages, Language contact phenomena, language variation and change, child language acquisition

• About

  Carmel O'Shannessy is currently documenting a newly emerged mixed language in northern Australia, Light Warlpiri, the emergence of which is the result of code-switching between an Australian language, Warlpiri, and English and Kriol (an English-lexified creole). Her current projects include diachronic changes in nominal case-marking from Warlpiri to Light Warlpiri, and grammaticalization and innovation in the Light Warlpiri auxiliary system. Of particular interest is the role of children in grammaticalization processes.
  
  Professor O'Shannessy's current and recent teaching includes Introduction to Sociolinguistics, Perspectives on bilingualism, Topics in Language Contact, Perspectives on First Language Acquisition, and Introduction to Language.  She is directing two Ph.D. dissertations, Erica Beck's (on children's social knowledge and speech perception) and Tridha Chatterjee's (on English-Bengali code-switching).

• Education

  • PhD in Linguistics, University of Sydney / Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The Netherlands, 2007

• Selected Publications:

• Articles

  • (2012) Code-switched input to children leads to a new mixed language, Linguistics
  • (2012) Typological constraints on verb integration in two Australian mixed languages, Journal of Language Contact
  • (2011) Comprehension of competing argument marking systems in two Australian mixed languages, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition
  • (2010) Archived transcriptions and annotations of traditional Warlpiri songs, null
  • (2010) Ordering arguments about, Lingua
  • (2010) Competition between word order and case-marking in interpreting grammatical relations, Journal of Child Language
  • (2005) Light Warlpiri - a new language, Australian Journal of Linguistics

• Book Chapters

  • (2011) Language contact and change, Handbook of endangered languages
  • (2011) Young children's social meaning-making in a new mixed language, Growing Up in Central Australia: New anthropological studies of Aboriginal childhood and adolescence
  • (2009) Language variation and change in a north Australian indigenous community, Variation in Indigenous Minority Languages
  • (2008) Children's production of their heritage language and a new mixed language, Children’s language and multilingualism: Indigenous language use at home and school