Abstract
Australian English is prototypically characterized by pronunciation features, a wealth of peculiar lexical items (Sheila, yakka, ute), idioms (blind Freddy, bush week, fair suck), and words ending in -ie, as in bikkie, brekkie, or Aussie, so-called hypocoristics. This chapter looks into Australian lexical items, idioms, as well as morphology, and their development, from a constructional perspective. It suggests that a constructional account is not only an elegant way of describing and analyzing these phenomena, but that the Australian context is also of particular value for testing and exemplifying constructional models of linguistic change. Section 7.1 outlines some basic ideas of usage-based construction grammar. Section 7.2 describes some exemplary lexical items, idioms, and hypocoristics in Australian English. Section 7.3 offers a picture of Australian English as a ‘sandbox of linguistic change’—a context in which linguistic changes, especially from a usage-based constructional perspective, can be studied in detail.
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Notes
- 1.
Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA, 560 million words), available at https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/.
- 2.
The following examples and their etymologies are all taken from ANU’s dictionary project (http://slll.cass.anu.edu.au/centres/andc/meanings-origins/all), henceforth ANUDP.
- 3.
Australian National Dictionary on Historical Principles (AND), 1st edition, edited by Ramson (1988), available online at https://australiannationaldictionary.com.au/oupnewindex1.php. Note that the dictionary, now in its second edition, ed. by Moore (2016), is an invaluable tool and resource for tracing word and phrase origins in Australian English. Unfortunately, the second edition was not available to the author at the time of writing.
- 4.
The data for this study comes from a collection of 1740 hypocoristics ‘from Australian speakers and written sources, other author’s works […], talk-back radio, and our observations over the last sixteen years’ (Simpson 2004: 643–4).
- 5.
Note that not all constructional taxonomies necessarily involve macro-constructions as the highest level of abstraction. Some do not even have a micro-level. In this case, I would argue, the abstraction stops at the meso-level (cf. Traugott 2008b).
- 6.
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Acknowledgements
My heartfelt thanks go to Keith Allan, not only for his angelic patience with a tardy author, but also for various excellent suggestions and his help with one or the other lexeme. Thanks also go to friends and colleagues at Bayreuth university for their input on an earlier version, and to an anonymous referee for catching some potentially very embarrassing slips of the pen.
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Bergs, A. (2020). What Do You Think This Is, Bush Week? Construction Grammar and Language Change in Australia. In: Allan, K. (eds) Dynamics of Language Changes. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-6430-7_7
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