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Assistant Professor

• Fields of Study

  • 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).

  Selected publications

  • 2005  Light Warlpiri - a new language.  Australian Journal of Linguistics.
  • 2008  Children's production of their heritage language and a new mixed language. In Jane Simpson and Gillian Wigglesworth, eds., Children's Language and Multilingualism: Indigenous Language Use at Home and School.  London & New York: Continuum International Press.
  • 2009  Language variation and change in a north Australian indigenous community. In James N. Stanford and Dennis R. Preston, eds., Variation in Indigenous Minority Languages.  Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
  • 2010  Competition between word order and case-marking in interpreting grammatical relations: a case study in multilingual acquisition.  Journal of Child Language.
  • 2010  Ordering arguments about: Word order and discourse motivations in the development and use of the ergative marker in two Australian mixed languages (with Felicity Meakins).  Lingua.
  • 2010  Archived transcriptions and annotations of traditional Warlpiri songs at the Endangered Languages Archive (ELAR), as part of the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, UK.
  • 2011  Young children's social meaning-making in a new mixed language.  In Ute Eickelkamp, ed., Growing Up in Central Australia: New Anthropological Studies of Aboriginal Childhood and adolescence. New York & Oxford: Berghan Books.
  • 2011  Language contact and change. In Peter Austin & Julia Sallabank, eds., Handbook of Endangered Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • 2011  Comprehension of competing argument marking systems in two Australian mixed languages (with Felicity Meakins). Bilingualism: Language and Cognition.
  • (In press)  Code-switched input to children leads to a new mixed language.  Linguistics.

• Education

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