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Vol. 56, no. 2 (Summer 2014)

Contents

Abstracts

Australian Exceptionalism in the Typology of Affinal Avoidance Registers

Luke Fleming
Université de Montréal

Abstract. This article systematizes speech registers employed in in-law avoidance into a cross-linguistic typology. Such affinal avoidance registers, consisting of lexical repertoires substituting for “everyday” speech forms tabooed for certain speakers or in certain contexts, are shown to typically diverge from one another in terms of two parameters, their context-sensitivity and the relatively idiolectal or sociolectal character of their register repertoires. Comparative data illustrate that Aboriginal Australian “mother-in-law” speech registers, which are context-sensitive and exclusively sociolectal, are highly exceptional among affinal avoidance registers cross-linguistically. In the final section of the article I seek to understand this exceptionalism in terms of the broader context of Aboriginal Australian ethnolinguistics.

Two Plains Cree Performances of a Pre-Victorian Kunstmärchen

H. C. Wolfart
University of Manitoba

Abstract. Old World tales found their way into the indigenous languages of North America mainly through the fur trade. Against the background of written translations by francophone missionaries, this study documents another complementary mode of transmission: the translation of literary texts from English by a speaker of Plains Cree. It is based on two performances recorded in 1982 by kâ¤mimikwatowêt/William Greyeyes on the authority of his father’s brother, Louis Ahenakew. The formal structures, both literary and linguistic, of the two texts (derived from a literary fairy tale first published in 1835) show them to be reinvented as instances (if marginal, perhaps) of classical Plains Cree texts.

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