In this thesis I describe aspects of referring expressions and referential practice in an English-lexified creole language spoken in the Ngukurr Aboriginal community, in the Northern Territory of Australia. Kriol has substrate influences from seven traditional Aboriginal languages. Dialects of Kriol are spoken in Aboriginal communities across the Top End of Australia; with estimates suggesting more than 20,000 people speak it as a first language. The language has a low status and in many contexts, such as health, medical and legal contexts, it frequently goes unrecognised as a legitimate language requiring interpreters. There is no comprehensive grammar of Kriol and as yet, there have been few in-depth studies into its structure and use. I investigate referential expressions in Kriol from various perspectives, using tools from a range of theoretical frameworks and research traditions, including descriptive linguistics, discourse analysis, information structure, and ethnopragmatics. The thesis provides an integrated description of how referential expressions are structured and how they are used in spontaneous talk to meet communicative needs. A further goal of this thesis is to demonstrate that there is significant continuity of referring strategies from Kriol's Aboriginal substrate languages. The data used in this study consists of a corpus of spontaneous discourse between two or more speakers, elicited material, and consultation with Elders on cultural issues relevant to language use. ... Each chapter contributes original description of the Kriol language. By combining a number of theoretical perspectives, the thesis offers an integrated description of the structure and function of referring expressions.

How are proverbs connected to notions of ritual, ritual communication, and ritualized communication? Along with greetings and partings, apology formulas, and the like, proverbs fall squarely under the rubric of "smaller" ritual, in the sense of formulaic communicative practices of everyday life: utterance forms with a quality of ready-madeness, fixity, and iteration, drawn from (and understood to be drawn from) a limited corpus. To be sure, they are not situation-specific in the same way greetings and partings are. Rather, proverbs are typically used to impose particular construals upon situations. Like scriptural allusions and quotations, proverbs epitomize "double-voicing," in Bakhtin's terms, standing aside from the ongoing flow of discourse even while being integrated into it. They necessarily bring a complex interdiscursivity into the speech situation. As Hasan-Rokem (1992: 129) put it: "The application of a proverb imbues the specific situation with cultural meaning by linking it to a chain of situations all of which may be interpreted by the same proverb." Proverbs can also be seen as falling under the rubric of ritual communication - or better, "ritualized" communication - in that they recapitulate and reproduce established cultural values. They are communicative vehicles that both enact traditional authority and are partially constitutive of it.