Although the official publication date for both is in 2025, two recent articles appeared in print this month: a contribution to a special issue on 'solitude speech' and one on negation. Both publications are based on my earlier collaboration with the Ngarinyin Aboriginal community in Western Australia.

Displayed monologues Aboriginal avoidance language as a codified pretense of solitude speech discusses the, so called, 'avoidance language' Yalan, belonging to the Ngarinyin Aboriginal community. The article presents a first detailed account of this special speech register and aims to correct some general assumptions about Aboriginal Avoidance speech styles, such as that they are only, or primarily, examples of lexical replacement. Within the special issue on 'solitude speech', the article calls Yalan a kind of 'displayed monologue': a phenomenon that shares features with self-talk, in the sense that avoidance speech consists of utterances presented as a kind of 'non-communication'. Many thanks to the editors of the special issue, Mitsuko Narita Izutsu and Katsunobu Izutsu, and the editor of the International Journal of Language and Culture, Esther Pascual.

Negation in Ngarinyin appears in the third volume of the book Negation in the world's languages, edited by Matti Miestamo, Ljuba Veselinova, and Héloïse Calame. Also many thanks to these editors for their invitation to contribute and their dedication to the mammoth project.

The articles are both available in open access through the links above.