A New Grammar of Dyirbal

R. M. W. Dixon's landmark 1972 grammar of the Dyirbal language of North Queensland is one of the best-known and most widely-cited language descriptions in the history of linguistics. In the fifty years since its publication, Dixon has continued his detailed work on the language, extending and refining the descriptions in light of more recent theoretical advances. The resulting A New Grammar of Dyirbal offers a comprehensive contemporary grammar of the language, reanalysed in myriad ways and drawing on an extensive corpus of texts. Among its many new features are further discussion of the applicative/causative derivation; a fresh focus on the role of the pervasive 'pivot', the syntactic linking of S and O functions; a detailed account of the two antipassives and their semantic contrast and phonological conditioning; and an extended account of relative clauses. The volume is accompanied by a companion website hosting the full set of textual data on which the grammar is based, as well as a thesaurus/dictionary of nouns, adjectives, and verbs across ten dialects of Dyirbal.

R. M. W. Dixon is Adjunct Professor at Central Queensland University, Cairns Campus, and has previously held positions at University College London, Harvard University, the Australian National University, University of California at Santa Cruz, La Trobe University, and James Cook University. His pioneering fieldwork on Indigenous Australian languages began in the 1960s and led, among many other works, to The Dyirbal Language of North Queensland (CUP 1972); he has also written grammars of Yidiñ, Warrgamay, Boumaa Fijian, and Jarawara. His many other books with OUP include the three-volume work Basic Linguistic Theory (2010-12), Making New Words: Morphological Derivation in English (2014), Edible Gender, Mother-in-Law Style, and Other Grammatical Wonders (2015; paperback 2020), Are Some Languages Better than Others? (2016; paperback 2018), and English Prepositions: Their Meanings and Uses (2021).