CAREER: Pama-Nyungan Reconstruction and the Prehistory of Australia

澳大利亚土著语言的最早详细记录可以追溯到大约200年前，因此，我们对澳大利亚土著过去的史前史的唯一访问是通过考古学和语言学的重建。虽然我们知道人类已经在澳大利亚生活了40，000多年，但我们不知道目前被证实的250种语言的使用者是如何生活在今天的地方的。这个项目利用语言证据追溯史前土著人民的历史。这些语言中词汇之间的系统相似性可以用来重建史前语言的各种属性。这些技术将被用来确定帕玛-尼永干语系的结构，这将有助于了解史前的人口流动。澳大利亚的语言史前史很重要，原因有几个。有人声称，为欧洲和美洲开发的方法在澳大利亚不起作用。如果是真的，这样的发现将是非常重要的，因为这些方法是基于语言变化的属性，直到现在一直被认为是普遍的。然而，初步研究表明，澳大利亚语言显示出我们在其他地方发现的相同特征。语言社区规模小，广泛的多种语言和其他因素掩盖了这些语言之间的关系。这些语言是一个很好的实验室，可以用来模拟农业社区传播之前的语言变化。如果我们要准确地模拟史前全球语言传播的样子，我们需要了解它在澳大利亚是如何运作的。

The earliest detailed records of Australia's indigenous languages date from approximately two hundred years ago, and therefore our only access to the prehistory of Australia's indigenous past is through reconstruction in archeology and linguistics. While we know that humans have lived in Australia for more than 40,000 years, we do not know how speakers of the 250 currently attested languages came to live where they do today. This project uses linguistic evidence to trace the history of Aboriginal people in prehistoric times. Systematic similarities between words in these languages can be used to reconstruct various properties of prehistoric languages. These techniques will be used to determine the structure of the Pama-Nyungan language family, which will shed light on prehistoric population movements.Australia's linguistic prehistory is important for several reasons. It has been claimed that methods developed for Europe and the Americas do not work in Australia. If true, such a finding would be highly important, since these methods are based on properties of language change which until now have been assumed to be universal. However, preliminary work indicates that Australian languages show the same characteristics that we find elsewhere. Small speech community size, widespread multilingualism, and other factors have obscured relationships between these languages. These languages are an excellent laboratory for modeling what language change might have been like before the spread of agricultural communities. If we are ever going to be able to model accurately what prehistoric global language spread might have looked like, we need to understand how it operated in Australia.