James Gray

About me

Hi! I'm a linguist interested in theoretical modelling of language, and especially involving Indigenous languages of Australia.

I'm currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Western Sydney University on the project The building blocks of language: Words in Central Australian languages, where I am working on Anmatyerr, an Arandic (Pama-Nyungan)  language of Central Australia.

I received my PhD in Linguistics at the Australian National University, where I was supervised by Jane Simpson, Carmel O'Shannessy, Mary Laughren, and Avery Andrews. Before beginning at ANU I completed a BA and MA in Linguistics at the University of Vienna.

I'm interested in documenting and modelling cross-linguistic variation, particularly on the syntax-semantics interface. I'm also interested in linguistic fieldwork and the relevance of under-researched languages for linguistic theory.

For my PhD I worked on Pintupi-Luritja, a Western Desert (Pama-Nyungan) language spoken in Central Australia. Languages of this region are well-known for allowing a huge amount of freedom in word order (at least in some domains); I looked at how factors like negation, focus and focus-sensitive particles, and modal readings impact this kind of freedom.

Publications

Presentations

2024

• Mismatches in Pintupi-Luritja focus particle placement
  57th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE)
  University of Helsinki, Finland. August 21 – 24
  
  

 2022

• Mismatches in Pintupi-Luritja focus particle placement
  Workshop on re-examining peripheral structures: Theoretical and empirical perspectives on linguistic (un)productivity
  Australian National University/Online. November 18

• The position of non-finite modality in a typology of variable force modality: Some thoughts on Pintupi-Luritja
  FEMIDAL workshop on modality in Australian languages
  Fontainebleau, France. October 27–28

• Notes on epistemic modal expression in Pintupi-Luritja
  IRP CNRS FEMIDAL project seminar talk
  CNRS, Paris [Online]. March 25  

2021

• Does Pintupi-Luritja tjinguru mean maybe? Maybe
  First Global Australian Languages Workshop (GALW1)
  Yale (Online).  May 17-20 2021

2020

• Variable modality in Pintupi-Luritja purposive clauses

Australian Linguistics Society Conference (ALS 2020)

Online. December 14 – 15

2019 

• At (the very) least: superlative modifiers, epistemic uncertainty, and preferred alternatives [poster]
  With Flóra Lili Donáti and Katherine Fraser
  Australian Linguistics Society Conference (ALS 2019)
  Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. December 11 – 13

• Syncretism in gender/number: puzzles from Yelmek verbal suppletion
  With Tina Gregor
  GLOW in Asia XII & 21st Seoul International Conference on Generative Grammar (SICOGG XXI)
  Dongguk University, Seoul, South Korea. August 7 – 9

• Syncretism patterns in Yelmek verbal suppletion
  With Tina Gregor
  Syntax and Morphology Interface in LFG (Workshop; 24th International LFG Conference)
  Australian National University, Canberra. July 8 – 10

• Towards a pragmatic/semantic characterisation of ‘at the very least’ [poster]
  With Flóra Lili Donáti and Katherine Fraser
  7th International Conference for Graduate students on Diverse Approaches to Linguistics (IGDAL 7)
  Hebrew University of Jerusalem. April 8

• At the very least a little different: A comparison of two superlative modified numerals
  With Flóra Lili Donáti and Katherine Fraser
  20th Workshop on the Roots of Pragmasemantics
  Szklarska Poręba, Poland. March 1 – 4

2018 

• A minimalist view on optional ergative marking
  Brno meets Vienna: Student conference on general linguistics
  Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic. October 20 – 21 2

• On non-restrictive relative clauses in Australian English
  Vienna Student Conference of Anglophone Studies
  University of Vienna, Austria. September 27 – 28

Storyboards for linguistic elicitation

Please feel free to use these in linguistic elicitation or otherwise (non-commercially)– please get in touch and let me know if you do though! I've used these to elicit stories/judgements in Pintupi-Luritja (Pama-Nyungan), and the Stolen Drink story in Sinaugoro (Papuan Tip, Oceanic) in an ANU field methods class.

Teaching 

• 2021 University of Vienna: Current topics in modality (MA seminar)

• 2015 University of Vienna: TA for General Linguistics (BA proseminar), taught by John Rennison and Manuel Križ

• 2014 University of Vienna: TA for Introduction to Phonetics and Phonology (BA lecture), taught by John Rennison

Contact

You can get in touch via email at james.gray@alumni.anu.edu.au