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DOI 10.33234/ssr.13.6
Geoffrey Sykes, Editor Southern Semiotic Review
This is a short book, but that does not prevent it having multiple parts and arguments. In the main it is a linguistic study of several traditional Australian Aboriginal, or indigenous, languages. There have been specialised exhaustive and scholarly studies in the same vein – however this book is selective in examples of grammar, terms of address, lexicons, pronunciation and poetic forms, resulting in a short (182 pages ) readable volume well suited to a popular audience. As such the volume fills a need for a general interest work of its kind.
.The book reflects the linguistic training and background of its author, and this explains the exclusion of domains of expression that semioticians would want to include in the spectrum of human languages. One is not talking about the horizontally, historical and geographical diversification of primary languages, but the multiform expression contained within each main language – a vertical diversification of languages.
