Wicked which and ninja never: relative clauses and negation in modern Australian English conversation

This thesis investigates changes in modern Australian English. It draws on the UWA Corpus of English in Australia, survey data, and the Australian reality television show Big Brother, focusing specifically on the negation and relative clauses in conversation. I argue that supposedly “bizarre” grammatical phenomena found here are motivated by social and interactional factors, such as illegitimately holding the floor for another turn with a counterfeit subordinator and morphologically reducing negation due to a cultural preference for agreement.