1 7 Semantics of Australian Languages Alice Gaby and Ruth Singer 1 To appear in: Koch, Harold & Rachel Nordlinger, eds, The Languages and Linguistics of Australia: A Comprehensive Guide. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 1. Introduction Genetic relatedness among all of Australia’s languages will probably never be proven. Nevertheless, recurring patterns of meaning – in the absence of lexical cognates – reveal cultural connections stretching right across the continent. There is meaning to be found at almost every level of grammar, from sublexical morphemes and processes, to individual words and the relationships between them, to larger constructions. As such, this chapter touches on a wide range of phenomena, revealing the interconnectedness of language and its contexts of use. Among these heterogeneous topics, there are nevertheless a number of recurring themes. The first of these themes is how people use language to divide the world and their experience of it into categories. This includes ontologies and classification of the natural world (§2.1 & §2.2), familial relations and kinship (§4.1), as well as the overt and covert meaning of grammatical systems of noun and verb classification (§2.2, §2.3, cf. Bowern this volume). A second theme concerns the organisation of meaning within categories themselves. This includes the identification of prototypes and delineation of categorical boundaries (§2.2, §3.3, §4.1). A third theme explores the meaning relationships that obtain between categories, including antonymy, metonymy, meronymy, hyponymy, metaphor and the distinction between polysemy and vagueness (§3.1–3.3, §4.1, §4.3, §4.4). A fourth theme is the mapping between distinct semiotic systems, for instance between language and gesture, different linguistic registers and so on (§3.2, §4.1, §4.5, §7). And finally, there emerges a theme of the embedding of semantics in communication, such that meaning structures cannot be understood in isolation from language use and language change (§3, §4.1, §5.1.1, §6, §7, §8). We begin in section 2 by considering classification of the natural world, choosing ethnobiology as a quintessentially Australian illustration. Sections 2.2 considers the semantic implications of the grammatical systems of nominal classification. Here we see metaphor and metonymy exploited to justify the system’s macro-categories. This thread is picked up and elaborated on in the following section 3, which considers the nature of the lexical sense relations antonymy, metonymy, metaphor, polysemy and vagueness. Section 4 goes on to consider five conceptual domains that have received particular attention from Australian semanticists, whether because of their exceptionally high or low degree of elaboration (e.g. kinship and mathematics respectively). The thread of metaphorical and metonymic linkages 1 For their suggestions for literature to include in this survey, thanks to Jenny Green, Harold Koch and Joe Blythe. They should be blamed for omissions. Neither should the authors – there’s a lot out there!