11/03/2020
ALS Newsletter February 2020
From the President
News from Newcastle
News from UWA
News from University of Sydney
News from Western Sydney University
News from the ANU
News from CDU
News from James Cook University (Language and Culture Research Centre)
News from Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language (CoEDL)
News from UNE
News from Macquarie University
News from the University of Adelaide
News from Living Languages
About ALS
From the President
The 2019 ALS conference was held under a cloud of smoke and 2020 has presented us all with new challenges. I hope everyone is able to stay healthy over the next while.
The Executive is yet to meet this year but as those of you who attended our AGM in Sydney last December know, we have a number of activities and initiatives that we want to see realised in 2020. We will be continuing to professionalise our administration so that we are able to sustainably manage our budget and plan for the future. We will be bringing in the services of a bookkeeper to help us keep our budget on track, and to help us determine the extent to which we will be raising membership dues, as agreed by the membership at the AGM.
In 2020 we will also be undertaking a benchmarking of tertiary providers of linguistics nationally. Linguistics programs are often are required to benchmark against others as part of regular review processes within institutions. We hope this exercise will streamline this process, but also provide the Linguistics teaching community with important information about where particular subjects are being taught, and the range of linguistics specialisations that are available nationally. As previewed at the AGM, we will be working towards an accreditation process so that graduates from ‘accredited’ programs can more officially consider themselves a member of a profession. We hope that this will broaden the appeal of ALS to linguists who are working outside of academia.
Ilana Mushin
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News from Newcastle
Grants
The ARC awarded Discovery Project funding for the project Landscape, language and culture in Indigenous Australia. Lead CI is Bill Palmer, with University of Newcastle as the host institution. The team on this large project include Alice Gaby (Monash), Joe Blythe (Macquarie), Maïa Ponsonnet (Western Australia), Dorothea Hoffmann (University of Oregon Eugene and The Language Conservancy), Margaret Carew (NT Dep’t Education), Clair Hill (Western Sydney and Lund University), and PhD student Tom Ennever. The grant is for $445,000 over three years.
The project will investigate how culture and social diversity interact with landscape in constructing representations of physical space in the minds and grammars of speakers of Australian Indigenous languages. The project involves two complementary programs of research. One will conduct the first Australia-wide survey of linguistic systems of spatial reference correlated with landscape, the second will carry out the first large-scale investigation of diversity in spatial behaviour among individuals within communities. The goal is to inform debates on the role of the physical environment in shaping linguistic spatial systems, the role of sociocultural factors in mediating between the environment and language, and the nature of diversity within communities in spatial behaviour, and in doing so advance knowledge of human spatial cognition.
Selected publications
Libert, Alan Reed. (2020). Interjections and other parts of speech. Berlin: Peter Lang. (https://www.peterlang.com/view/title/17818?format=EPDF)
Palmer, Bill, Joe Blythe, Alice Gaby, Dorothea Hoffmann & Maïa Ponsonnet. (2019). Geospatial natural language in Indigenous Australia: Research priorities. In Kristin Stock, Christopher B. Jones & Thora Tenbrink (eds.) Speaking of Location 2019: Communicating about Space. CEUR Workshop Proceedings. 2455:17-27 (http://ceur-ws.org)
Wiener, Seth, Marjorie K.M. Chan & Kiwako Ito. (2020). Do explicit instruction and high variability phonetic training improve non-native speakers’ Mandarin tone productions? The Modern Language Journal. 104(1):152-168
Wong, Wynne, Laurene Glimois & Kiwako Ito. (2020). PI and the French causative and passive constructions: Examining transfer-of-training effects using eye-tracking. In M. Leeser, G. Keating and W. Wong (eds.)Research on second language processing and processing instruction: Studies in honor of Bill VanPatten. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Selected conferences and workshops
Bill Palmer was an invited panellist on an interdisciplinary panel Communicating about Space at the 14th International Conference on Spatial Information Theory in Regensburg, Germany.
Alan Libert presented the papers Thinking Creatively about Teaching Meronymy at the Hokkaido JALT conference in Sapporo, Japan, and Teaching Plesionymy vs. Synonymy at the 16th Annual CamTESOL conference in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
Bill Palmer
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News from UWA
Welcome
Troy Reynolds has joined our PhD program. He will be working on sociolinguistic aspects of Aboriginal English under the supervision of Celeste Rodríguez Louro, Marie-Eve Ritz and Maïa Ponsonnet. Welcome to the team, Troy!
Internships
UWA Linguistics students can now include a work integrated learning unit, based at a community language centre, in their Linguistics major. The first student to take advantage of this opportunity is Alex Stephenson. This is what he has to say about the experience: ‘At Wangka Maya I worked with language specialists in Nyangumarta, Martu Wangka and Putijarra to produce language resources as well as helping the Senior Linguist with community research, archiving and the Pilbara Language Vitality Survey. I really enjoyed the experience at Wangka Maya because I was able to apply my Linguistics knowledge and to better understand the more practical side of the field’.
Online resources
Check out the brand new online Eastern and Central Arrernte Learners’ List. John Henderson has been working on it with his long-term colleague Veronica Dobson, other Arrernte community members, colleagues at Batchelor Institute in Alice Springs, and the Institute for Aboriginal Development. You can find it at Arrernte Angkentye Online (Arrernte Language Online) https://arrernte-angkentye.online. The wordlist has over 750 entries selected for learners of Arrernte language and/or literacy, with simple English equivalents, pronunciation examples to listen to, useful topic sub-lists for learners, and searching by Arrernte or English. It’s presented in separate formats for mobiles and desktops/laptops. This is part of a wider project to develop a range of online resources from the much larger and more detailed Eastern & Central Arrernte to English Dictionary.
Visiting PhD student
Amanda Hamilton-Hollaway, a PhD student at the University of Queensland, continues to spend much of her time in the UWA Linguistics Department. At the end of February, she will travel to Minjerribah (North Stradbroke Island) to give a presentation titled ‘Toking abat abat: A grammatical cline in Elliott-area Kriol’ at the Australian Languages Workshop. Three Mudburra language consultants are also attending ALW so they will work together during that time to record the headwords for the online version of the new Mudburra dictionary, which was launched in hardcopy last November.
Grants
Dr Maïa Ponsonnet and her team members Bill Palmer (Newcastle), Joe Blythe (Macquarie), and Alice Gaby (Monash) have been awarded an ARC Discovery Project Grant valued at $455,000 for their project titled ‘Landscape, language and culture in Indigenous Australia’. The project aims to determine how culture and social diversity interact with landscape in representing physical space in the minds and grammars of speakers of Australian Indigenous languages. The project will conduct the first Australia-wide survey of Indigenous spatial description correlated with landscape, and the first large-scale investigation of diversity in spatial behaviour among individuals within communities. The findings are expected to inform crucial debates on the formative role of landscape in language and advance our knowledge of human spatial cognition. It will collect completely new experimental and natural data in six endangered languages, with significant benefits for the maintenance of Indigenous languages and cultures.
Publications
Maïa Ponsonnet, The Conversation, 27 January 2020. Indigenous languages matter – but not all is lost when they change or even disappear. https://theconversation.com/indigenous-languages-matter-but-all-is-not-lost-when-they-change-or-even-disappear-127519
PhD Completion
Congratulations to Dr Luisa Miceli who has submitted and passed her PhD thesis titled 'Unbalanced comparative patterns in historical linguistics: Theoretical implications and explanatory mechanisms for their development'. Well done, Luisa!
ALS2019
UWA Linguistics was well represented at ALS2019.
Daniel Midgley presented ‘Building the Curriculum’ in the Linguistics and Teaching Professionals panel organised by Jean Mulder and the Linguistics in the School Curriculum special interest group for ALS2019.
Connor Brown, ‘A description of reciprocity and reflexivity in Light Warlpiri’ (with Carmel O’Shannessy, ANU).
Luisa Miceli, ‘Doppel avoidance in dominant forms’ (with Mark Ellison, University of Cologne; Alba Tuninetti, Western Sydney University; Paola Escudero, Western Sydney University and Niels Schiller, Leiden University).
David Moore, ‘Switch Reference in Arandic language varieties revisited’, poster session.
Maïa Ponsonnet, ‘A typology of body-based emotion metaphors in Australian languages’ (with Kitty-Jean Laginha, University of New South Wales), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cu7HPSS3rc&t=106s
Celeste Rodríguez Louro & Glenys Collard, ‘Yarnin the blackfella way: Quotation in urban Aboriginal Australia’.
Other invited talks and conference presentations
Amy Budrikis. ‘Acquiring and Transmitting Language Ideologies and Norms of Endangered Australian Languages’ at the Languages & Cultures Network for Australian Universities National Colloquium in Perth, WA, 27-29 November 2019.
Amy Budrikis. ‘Shaping and Re-Shaping Children’s Language Ideologies: The Missing Link’ at the Foundation for Endangered Languages XXIII conference in Sydney, NSW 13-16 December 2019.
Maïa Ponsonnet and Kitty-Jean Laginha, ‘Is fear in your heart and love in your throat?
Linguistic variation and cultural diversity in Australian emotion metaphors’, Language & Culture Network for Australian University, LCNAU Conference, Perth, November 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3S3-Pdd94cA&t=7s
Maïa Ponsonnet, Difference and repetition in language shift to a creole (an overview of Maïa’s latest book), LLACAN (CNRS, Paris), January 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nX8WXS6uleI&t=811s
Maïa Ponsonnet, A preliminary of Australian interjections, Seminar at DDL (CNRS, Lyon), January 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zhssp4IH7o
Celeste Rodríguez Louro & Glenys Collard. ‘Working together: Sociolinguistic research in urban Aboriginal Australia’, New Ways of Analyzing Variation Asia-Pacific 6, National University of Singapore. Postponed till 2021 due to coronavirus.
Talk the Talk host gives a Ted Talk
Daniel Midgley presented a talk at TEDx Perth on 7 September 2019 at the Perth Concert Hall. The all-day event featured speakers, researchers, and thought leaders from WA. The talk can be accessed on: https://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_midgley_changing_minds_one_yous_at_a_time.
Future engagements
Invited plenary address
Celeste Rodríguez Louro has been invited to deliver a plenary address at Discourse Pragmatic Variation and Change 5, to be held at The University of Melbourne, 3-5 June 2020. The title of her presentation is ‘The soul of language: Discourse-pragmatic variation and change in urban Aboriginal English’. You can read the abstract here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XX0JYtBslVNUdy4SjcyRraquiNUbKIBJ/view. More information, including whether the session will be recorded, will be available closer to the date.
Upcoming Professional Development for Teachers
UWA Linguistics has again joined forces with the WA Department of Education to offer an original professional development for teachers. Titled ‘Understanding language’, this one-day workshop to be held on Saturday 21 March 2020 will help debunk the following myths:
- People tend to think that language exists in dictionaries and grammars, but language thrives in orality. It has since our ancestors’ first grunts and gestures and it constitutes the heart and soul of traditional culture.
- We all have accents, but some are more marked than others. A student’s ‘accent’ does not constitute a problem.
- Beliefs in the existence of ‘good English’ and ‘broken English’ can seriously undermine student confidence and self-esteem with significant consequences for the development of their intellectual ability and subsequent life pathways.
More information is available on: https://www.uwa.edu.au/study/events/understanding-language-2020
Upcoming UWA Linguistics seminars
In line with our Sustainable Linguistics policy, our department will host a handful of ‘remote seminars’ in 2020. Our first guest is Sally Dixon (University of New England), scheduled for 12.30pm 28 February 2020. The first remote session has been an opportunity to test our institution’s remote-conferencing facilities, and to imagine creative technical solutions. Watch this space! We should be able to record the seminar.
While we’re at it, if you haven’t yet had a chance to read our Sustainable Linguistics document, and you wish to do so, you can find it here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/kkl8kplwkdj86kl/AAA_uplh65hcOim85GOs66XSa?dl=0.
Celeste Rodríguez Luoro
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News from University of Sydney
Awards
The Australian’s 2019 Research Magazine identified Ahmar Mahboob as Australia's leading researcher in the field of English Language and Literature. https://specialreports.theaustralian.com.au/1540291/27/
The Multilingual Citizen, co-edited by Lisa Lim, together with Chirstopher Stroud (University of the Western Cape) and Lionel Wee (National University of Singapore) (Multilingual Matters 2018), was shortlisted for the British Association for Applied Linguistics (BAAL) 2019 Book Prize. http://www.multilingual-matters.com/display.asp
Field research
In late December, Nick Enfield completed a field trip in upland central Laos, focusing on describing the differences between two dialects of the Kri language. For a number of years, Nick has been describing the Mrka dialect of Kri, and on this trip was able to focus on another variety, Kri Phòòngq, spoken in the village of Pung, downstream from Mrka. The most striking point of comparison is in the phonology: The Mrka variety has a phonation-type phonological system, while Kri Phòòngq has phonologized pitch contour, and is a pitch-based tone language. The case demonstrates the thinness of the line between phonation-type phonologies and pitch-based tone phonologies. The work is part of Nick’s current ARC Discovery Project “Do Language Ethnic Boundaries Stabilize Ethnic Boundaries?”, which is supporting a team of PhDs and a post-doc doing field-based descriptions of Kri (Vietic, Austroasiatic), Bru (Katuic, Austroasiatic), and Saek (Northern Tai), typological comparison among the three languages, and ethnographic work on the intensive language contact characteristic of the area.
Traders en route between villages in the Nakai Nam Theun watershed in upland Laos, a context for intensive language contact (December 2019)
Young speakers of Kri Phòòngq, Pung Village Laos, December 2019
Recent events
The 13th Free Linguistics Conference was held on 3-4 October 2019 at the Federal University of Paraiba, Joao Pessoa, Brazil (http://www.flcgroup.net/current-conference-2/). The Free Linguistics Conference was established in 2007 at the University of Sydney by Ahmar Mahboob (and Naomi K. Knight, who returned to Canada after her PhD), who continues to coordinate FLC. FLC’s mission is to provide an accessible forum for people working in the area of language sciences to come together and share their diverse perspectives, practices and research. Presentations and workshops at Free Linguistics Conference range across various subjects in language studies, including (but not limited to) language education, applied linguistics, and linguistics, breaking down borders between disciplines and sub-fields.
Over the Semester 2 midterm break, the University of Sydney hosted two major events that drew close to 200 people.
The first was the Australian Systemic Functional Linguistics Association conference, co-convened by Yaegan Doran, Alex García and Dorothy Economou (30th Sep-4th October). This involved a two-day pre-conference institute with six workshops, taught by Sue Hood (Body language and gesture), Brad Smith (Systemic phonology), Peter White (Appraisal), Karl Maton (Legitimation Code Theory), David Rose (Reading to Learn) and Alex García and Georgia Carr (Corpus Linguistics, supported by Monika Bednarek). This was followed by the 3-day conference itself, with around 100 presenters taking part and offering an incredibly wide-ranging set of plenaries, keynotes, colloquia and parallel papers. The conference was excellent, showcasing in particular a large number of up and coming young scholars pushing linguistics and semiotics forward, and the organisers would like to thank everyone who took part.
The second event, organised by Theo van Leeuwen and Yaegan Doran, on 5 October, was a Symposium in Honour of Gunther Kress, who sadly died earlier this year. Gunther was a key figure in sparking a number of major international movements in linguistics in the late 20th and early 21st century, including starting the field of critical linguistics and then critical discourse analysis, arising from his and colleagues work in the 70s at University of East Anglia; then genre pedagogy and the re-introduction of linguistics into education, which amongst other things, underpins much of the literacy components of Australian national curriculum as well as many others across the world; and then Social Semiotics and multimodality, the most expansive and rapidly growing field in semiotics and discourse analysis since the 80s and 90s, growing out of what was known as the ‘Newtown Semiotic Circle’ that involved an influential set of soon to be Professors across Sydney. The day itself included a series of warmly heartfelt talks about Gunther and the work he has influenced from Emilia Djonov, Louise Ravelli, Noel King, Peter Knapp and Anne-Cranny-Francis, Mary Kalantzis, Bill Cope, Theo van Leeuwen, Jim Martin and Bob Hodge. It was a wonderful heart-warming day. An obituary of Gunther in the Irish times can be found here: https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/from-writing-to-image-how-gunter-kress-helped-change-the-way-we-think-1.3988599
Upcoming events
The Foundation for Endangered Languages (FEL)’s 2019 conference, organised by the Sydney Centre for Language Research, will be held at the University of Sydney, from 13-16 December 2019, with the theme ‘Causes of language endangerment: Looking for answers and finding solutions to the global decline in linguistic diversity’, with keynote speaker Umberto Ansaldo. http://www.ogmios.org/conferences/2019/
The 4th Documentary Linguistics – Asian Perspectives (DLAP4) conference, will be organised by Department of Linguistics and the Sydney Centre for Language Research, at the University of Sydney, from 3-5 June 2020, with the theme ‘Minorities of Asia: Centring Linguistic, Musical and Performative Practices of Marginalised Peoples’. Abstract deadline 30 November 2019.
Recent publications
Martin, J. R., Doran, Y. J. and Figueredo, G. (eds) Systemic Functional Language Description: Making Meaning Matter. London: Routledge. October 2019.
This volume showcases previously unpublished research on theoretical, descriptive, and methodological innovations for understanding language patterns grounded in a Systemic Functional Linguistic perspective. Featuring contributions from an international range of scholars, the book demonstrates how advances in SFL have developed to reflect the breadth of variation in language and how descriptive methodologies for language have evolved in turn. Taken together, the volume offers a comprehensive account of Systemic Functional Language description, providing a foundation for practice and further research for students and scholars in descriptive linguistics, SFL, and theoretical linguistics.
Martin, J. R., Maton, K. and Doran, Y. J. (eds) Accessing Academic Discourse: Systemic Functional Linguistics and Legitimation Code Theory. London: Routledge. November 2019.
Academic discourse is the gateway not only to educational success but to worlds of imagination, discovery and accumulated wisdom. Understanding the nature of academic discourse and developing ways of helping everyone access, shape and change this knowledge is critical to supporting social justice. Yet education research often ignores the forms taken by knowledge and the language through which they are expressed. This volume comprises cutting-edge work that is bringing together sociological and linguistic approaches to access academic discourse. Systemic functional linguistics (SFL) is a long-established and widely known approach to understanding language. Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) is a younger and rapidly growing approach to exploring and shaping knowledge practices. Now evermore research and practice are using these approaches together. This volume presents new advances from this inter-disciplinary dialogue, focusing on state-of-the-art work in SFL provoked by its productive dialogue with LCT. It showcases work by the leading lights of both approaches, including the foremost scholar of SFL and the creator of LCT. Chapters introduce key ideas from LCT, new conceptual developments in SFL, studies using both approaches, and guidelines for shaping curriculum and pedagogy to support access to academic discourse in classrooms. The book is essential reading for all appliable and educational linguists, as well as scholars and practitioners of education and sociology.
Selected conference presentations
PhD student Georgia Carr and Monika Bednarek brought a linguistic perspective to the Australasian Diabetes Congress 2019, held in Sydney from 21-23 August, with a poster on “‘Waging war on diabetes’: Diabetes coverage in Australian newspapers”.
New resource
Jarrak is a web-based timeline of milestones relating to advocacy and action for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages in Australia. It is available at www.jarrak.com.au and houses documentary and audio-visual evidence of many aspects of the journey. Users can click to browse through the items one by one, from the start to the end of the timeline, or use the search function. Jarrak was undertaken as part of the University of Sydney’s Sydney Policy Lab Community Fellowship program, connecting staff and committee members of First Languages Australia (an Indigenous not-for-profit organisation, a nation-wide peak voice for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander language communities (https://www.firstlanguages.org.au) with the School of Education and Social Work researchers Susan Goodwin and Susan Poetsch. As the field of language revitalisation continues to grow in Australia, newcomers can be readily guided to the cache of materials on Jarrak, to assist them to become familiar with the history of the sector, whether they be Ministers, public servants, community members, volunteers, university students or researchers, for example. Many items on Jarrak are also useful for media agencies and journalists, teachers and students in schools, and interested members of the general public.
Jarrak has been under construction 2018-2019. It will be launched on 20 November 2019, in honour of the UN’s International Year of Indigenous Languages.
Visiting scholars
Guichao Zhang from Shanghai Jiao Tong University is a visiting researcher at the Department of Linguistics with the help of a USYD-CSC Postgaduate Research Visiting Scholarship.
Engagement and impact
Mark W. Post continues his work (since 2008) with the Galo Language Development Committee involving collaborative development and popularization of Galo orthography, dictionary development and publication, teacher training workshops, community publishing initiatives, mobile dictionary app. 2019 has seen work on a predictive text tool for mobile phones, and speeches delivered in Galo on importance of language and heritage conservation at large community gatherings e.g. Galo Grand Council, with more than 3,000 people in attendance.
His meetings with political leaders in Arunachal Pradesh and Delhi around language recognition and funding for language documentation, which resulted in state recognition of Galo language in 2009, has in 2019 seen a sanction of Rs 30,000,000 fund for language documentation by Arunachal Pradesh Chief Minister.
Lisa Lim writes a fortnightly “Language Matters” column for Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post’s Sunday Post Magazine, at https://www.scmp.com/author/lisa-lim ; some recent column topics include:
Lisa Lim
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News from Western Sydney University
Theses Submitted
Mark Richards: Revitalisation of an Australian Aboriginal Language: Archival Utterances as Scaffolding for Independent Adult Language Learning https://cloudstor.aarnet.edu.au/plus/s/unn8c2hLJ1do2nE
In collaboration with Jilkminggan, an Australian Aboriginal community in the western Roper area of the Northern Territory, we investigated the use of archival recordings for revitalisation of Mangarrayi, the traditional language of the community. This research provides evidence of existing capacity amongst younger adult community members for creation of teaching and learning resources. The use of archival audio utterances organised into communicative domains with face-to-face learning from speaker Sheila Conway, rekindled knowledge of older community members, and external metalinguistic and pedagogic expertise, helped develop language knowledge and skills, providing a possible model for sustainable revitalisation of other Aboriginal languages.
Publications
Book Chapters
Best, C. T., Avesani, C., Tyler, M. D., & Vayra, M. (2019). PAM revisits the articulatory organ hypothesis : Italians' perception of English anterior and Nuu-Chah-Nulth posterior voiceless fricatives. In A. M. Nyvad, M. Hejná, A. Højen, A. B. Jespersen, & M. H. Sørensen (Eds.), A Sound Approach to Language Matters: In Honor of Ocke-Schwen Bohn (pp. 13-40).
Elvin, J., Vasiliev, P., & Escudero, P. (2019). Production and perception in the acquisition of Spanish and Portuguese. In M. Gibson & J. Gil (Eds.), Romance Phonetics and Phonology (pp. 367-380).
Sarvasy, H. (2019). Short, finite and one-sided bridges in Logoori. In V. Guerin (Ed.), Bridging Constructions (pp. 79-98). https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2563682
Sarvasy, H., & Ogate, E. (2019). Early writing in Nungon in Papua New Guinea. In A. Sherris & J. K. Peyton (Eds.), Teaching Writing to Children in Indigenous Languages: Instructional Practices from Global Contexts (pp. 185-201).
Journal Articles
Antoniou, M. (2019). The advantages of bilingualism debate. Annual Review Of Linguistics, 5, 395-415. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-linguistics-011718-011820
Baker, J., Raman, S., Kohlhoff, J., George, A., Kaplun, C., Dadich, A., Best, C. T., Arora, A., Zwi, K., Schmied, V. & Eapen, V. (2019). Optimising refugee children’s health/wellbeing in preparation for primary and secondary school: A qualitative inquiry. BMC Public Health.
Best, C. T. (2019). The diversity of tone languages and the roles of pitch variation in non-tone languages : considerations for tone perception research. Frontiers In Psychology, 10. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00364
Bruggeman, L., Cutler, A. (2019). No L1 privilege in talker adaptation. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728919000646
Dwyer, A. R., Jones, C., Davis, C., Kitamura, C., & Ching, T. Y. (2019). Maternal education influences Australian infants’ language experience from six months. Infancy, 24(1), 90-100. https://doi.org/10.1111/infa.12262
Dwyer, A. R., Jones, C., & Rosas, L. (2019). What digital technology do early childhood educators use and what digital resources do they seek? Australasian Journal Of Early Childhood. https://doi.org/10.1177/1836939119841459
Hendery, R. and Burrell, A. (2020), "Playful interfaces to the archive and the embodied experience of data", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 76 No. 2, pp. 484-501. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-05-2019-0078
Nazzi, T and Cutler, A. How Consonants and Vowels shape Spoken-Language Recognition. Annual Review of Linguistics Vol. 5:25-47 (Volume publication date January 2019).
Riedel, Kristina, Hannah Sarvasy, and Katherine Demuth. 2019. “The Narrative Past inflection in Sesotho child and child-directed speech.” Frontiers in Communication 4:69.
Sarvasy, Hannah. 2019. “The root nominal stage: a case study of early Nungon verbs.” Journal of Child Language 46(6), 1073-1101.
Sarvasy, Hannah. 2019. “Taboo and secrecy in Nungon speech.” In Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald and Anne Storch (eds.), Taboo in Language and Discourse. Special issue of The Mouth. 19-30.
Tieu, Lyn, Manuel Križ & Emmanuel Chemla. 2019. “Children’s acquisition of homogeneity in plural definite descriptions.” Frontiers in Psychology. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02329
Tieu, Lyn, Philippe Schlenker & Emmanuel Chemla. 2019. “Linguistic inferences without words.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) 116(20), 9796-9801. doi:10.1073/pnas.1821018116
Wong, P. C. M., Ou, J., Pang, C. W. Y., Zhang, L., Tse, C. S., Lam, L. C. W., & Antoniou, M. (2019). Language training leads to global cognitive improvement in older adults. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 62, 2411-2424.
Yazawa, K., Whang, J., Kondo, M., & Escudero, P. (2019). Language-dependent cue weighting : an investigation of perception modes in L2 learning. Second Language Research. https://doi.org/10.1177/0267658319832645
Zeng, Z., Kalashinkova, M., & Antoniou, M. (2019). Integrating bilingualism, verbal fluency, and executive functioning across the lifespan. Journal of Cognition and Development, 20, 656-679.
Rachel Hendery
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News from the ANU
Synapse Seminar: Searching for a sixth sense with Gurindji people, Felicity Meakins, Monday, 23 March 2020, ANU.
Seminar podcast: Words & Genes As Windows On Our Past, by Russell Gray (Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History).
Seminar podcast: SIGNAL & PROCESS – Reconstructing Language Histories In Melanesia, by Bethwyn Evans (ANU).
60+ years of linguistics at ANU
Linguistics has been a key discipline of ANU for over 60 years. On 5-6 August 2020, we will hold a conference to celebrate the role ANU has played in shaping the field over that time. We are inviting all alumni, associates and friends of ANU linguistics to come to engage in discussions about language, linguistics research and how a knowledge of linguistics can be applied to different areas of life, national debates, policy and infrastructure relating to languages. You can find more information about the event here. (Abstracts due 27 March)
Fellowships & Awards
ANU PhD student Aarin Sirima has been awarded a $900 (USD) SEALS travel grant. She will present a paper entitled ‘Reciprocal prefixes in Mori Atas' at the 30th SEALS Annual Meeting at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.
Grant Aiton has recently begun an ELDP-funded postdoctoral fellowship at CoEDL to work on the Eibela and Sonia languages of PNG.
Publications
Barth, Danielle, Grama, James, Gonzalez, Simon, & Travis, Catherine E. (2020). Using forced alignment for sociophonetic research on a minority language. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics (Selected Papers from NWAV 47), 25(2): Article 2. https://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/vol25/iss22/22
O’Shannessy, Carmel (2020). Warlpiri and language contact. In Grant, Anthony (Ed) Oxford Handbook of Language Contact. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sosiowati, I Gusti Ayu Gde, I Wayan Arka, I Nyoman Aryawibawa, and Ni Made Ayu Widiastuti (2019). Domain change and ethnolinguistic vitality: Evidence from the fishing lexicon of Loloan Malay. Language Documentation & Conservation No. 13: 586–617.
Ye, Zhengdao (2020). The semantics of emotion: from theory to empirical analysis. In Sonya E. Pitzker, Janina Fenigsen and James M. Wilce (eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Language and Emotion. London/New York: Routledge, 132-153.
Recent publications from the Mouton Pacific Linguistics Series
The Pacific Linguistics series presents linguistic descriptions, dictionaries and other materials concerned with languages of this region, with its Editorial Board based at ANU:
Spatial Expression in Caac (2018), Aurélie Cauchard. Vol. 650.
Murrinhpatha Morphology and Phonology (2019), by John Mansfield. Vol. 653.
A Grammar of Kilmeri (2018), by Claudia Gerstner-Link. Vol. 654.
Conceptual Transfer as an Areal Factor (2019), by Stefanie Siebenhütter. Vol. 656:
Koromu (Kesawai) (2019), by Carol Priestley. Vol. 658.
A Grammar and Dictionary of Tayap (2019) by Don Kulick and Angela Terrill. Vol. 661.
Noun Phrases in Australian Languages (2019), by Dana Louagie. Vol. 662.
Wayan Arka
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News from CDU
Charles Darwin University recently hosted 16 Indigenous language workers (plus a few non-Indigenous folk) at an intensive course on ‘Linguistics for Indigenous Languages’ as part of the Australian Indigenous Languages Institute – see https://aili.cdu.edu.au/previous-courses/february-2020-intensive/ for more details. Participants came from Kununurra, Groote Eylandt, Ngukurr, Innisfail, Ceduna, Shepparton, Adelaide and Darwin, with travel support from the Indigenous Languages and Arts program. Some of the participants plan to enrol in the Diploma of Arts with a focus on Indigenous languages through CDU/Batchelor Institute.
Some of the participants and teachers of the AILI course in Darwin, February 2020
Honorary adjunct researcher Dr John Mansfield is visiting from the University of Melbourne, undertaking research on language in the NT correctional system. He will present a seminar on 4 March on ‘Aboriginal languages in Darwin prison’ co-hosted by the Northern Institute, the North Australian Research Unit and the Top End Linguistic Circle. If you’re passing through Darwin and would like to present at the Top End Linguistic Circle, please contact topendlingcircle@gmail.com
Three PhD students recently passed their confirmation of candidature (all supervised by Steven Bird):
- William Lane - Computational Modeling of Polysynthetic Languages and Applications in Language Learning
- Eric Le Ferrand - Community Based Methods for Efficient, Collaborative Speech Transcription
- Brandon Wiltshire - Designing Effective Language Programs to Serve Multiple Language Ideologies
Charles Darwin University is proud to offer three Indigenous languages as part of its new Bachelor of Arts program (which includes a major in languages and linguistics). Students can learn Yolngu Matha from northeast Arnhem Land (6 units available), Arrernte from Central Australia (semester 1 only) and Bininj Kunwok from West Arnhem Land (semester 2 only). All are available online and through cross-institutional enrolment if students would like to add an Indigenous language to their degree at another university.
Cathy Bow
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News from James Cook University (Language and Culture Research Centre)
LCRC members news
Piar Karim (MA University of Northern Texas) will start his course at LCRC in June 2020, working on a comprehensive grammar of Domaaki, from the Central Group of Indo-Aryan languages spoken in Gilgit-Baltistan in Pakistan.
PhD completions
Junwei Bai (Abe) completed his PhD 'A grammar of Munya, a Tibeto-Burman language', with a rare award 'cum laude'.
Visiting Fellows at the LCRC in late 2019
Professor Heronides Moura (PhD 1996, Unicamp, Brazil), Professor of linguistics at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, an expert on Portuguese and Romance linguistics will be visiting the LCRC from 20 February to 25 March 2020, working on various issues in the grammatical structure of Romance languages in typological perspective.
Yann Le Mouillec (PhD student at LACITO, Paris), with a background in Indo-European and other languages, is working on Angaataha, an Angan language of Papua New Guinea (Morobe province). He will be visiting LCRC from 28 February to 28 March 2020, consulting with Professor Aikhenvald (his second supervisor) and working on the outcomes of his field research.
Professor Don Kulick (University of Uppsala) is a high-profile linguistic anthropologist who has published extensively on language endangerment and linguistic and cultural diversity in PNG, with special focus on the languages and cultures of the Sepik area. He is visiting LCRC between 9 February and 13 March, working on language endangerment in PNG.
Dr René van den Berg (Linguistics Consultant of SIL at Ukarumpa, PNG, and member of the International Consultative Board of LCRC, visited LCRC in April 2019) will be at the LCRC from 9 February until the first week of March. He will be working on a sketch of Busoa, a small endangered language of southeast Sulawesi, closely related to Muna, with a view to publishing a brief grammar sketch, accompanied by texts and a vocabulary. He will give a talk on 'Three particles in Muna (Sulawesi): commiserative, mirative, common ground'.
Dr Katarzyna Wojtylak, University of Regensburg, Germany, will be visiting LCRC in 2020. During her stay, Dr Wojtylak will be working on a number of articles related to language contact in Northwest Amazonia. She will also prepare a research proposal on language description of Andoke, a language isolate from Colombia (within the framework of Basic Linguistic Theory).
New books published and forthcoming
Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald. A guide to gender and classifiers. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Forthcoming.
Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald. 2020. I saw the dog. How language works. London: Profile Books (due May 2020).
Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald and R. M. W. Dixon. 2020. Commands: a cross-linguistic typology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Paperback edition.
Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald, R. M. W. Dixon, and Nathan M. White. Forthcoming. Phonological word and grammatical word: a cross-linguistic typology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Luca Ciucci. Forthcoming. Ignace Chomé: Vocabulario de la lengua zamuca - Edición crítica y comentario lingüístico. Iberoamericana Verfuert Verlag.
R. M. W. Dixon. Forthcoming. (2021). English prepositions: their meanings and usage. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Carola Emkow. 2019. A grammar of Araona. Munich: Lincom Europa.
Katarzyna I. Wojtylak. A grammar of Murui. Leiden: Brill. Forthcoming.
Roundtable meetings and workshop
The fortnightly Workshop of the LCRC, 'Questions', commences on 19 February 2020. The materials for the Workshop will soon be available at http://research.jcu.edu.au/lcrc
Workshop on Questions, Wednesday 19 February
1 Bob Dixon: Introduction to Workshop and Alexandra Aikhenvald on Questions
Seminar, Wednesday 26 February
René van den Berg: Three particles in Muna (Sulawesi): commiserative, miserative, common ground
Seminar, Wednesday 4 March
Ton Otto: Concepts of personhood and practices of 'world making' on Baluan, PNG
Seminar, Wednesday 11 March
Don Kulick: Language death in Papua New Guinea
Seminar, Wednesday 18 March
Heronides Moura: Phrasal verbs in Brazilian Portuguese: the expression of directed motion from a typological perspective
Workshop on Questions, Wednesday 25 March
2 Nathan White: Questions in North Queensland Hmong
Seminar, Wednesday 1 April
Rob Bradshaw: Differential subject marking in Doromu-Koki
Workshop on Questions, Wednesday 8 April
3 Alexandra Aikhenvald: Questions in Tariana
everyone is most welcome
The Tropical Languages and Cultures Documentation Laboratory is located within the Language and Culture Research Centre (LCRC)
The Tropical Languages and Cultures Documentation Laboratory offers recording facilities, and opportunities for creating orthographies, reading and other materials, and developing web-based resources, in endangered and poorly documented languages of the tropics. Services provided include research consultancy and online services. For further details please consult:
Distinguished Professor Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald Alexandra.Aikhenvald@jcu.edu.au, 61-7-42321117
The LCRC 2019 Bulletin and other materials are now available on our new site at https://www.jcu.edu.au/lcrc/news-and-events/latest-news
Alexandra (Sasha) Aikhenvald
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News from Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language (CoEDL)
Upcoming events
The Australian Languages Workshop (ALW) is the annual meeting of linguists and language practitioners researching, revitalising and advocating for First Nations languages. Nest year, ALW will be held on Minjerribah (North Stradbroke Island, Queensland), which is the lands of the Quandamooka Peoples, from 28 February to 1 March 2020.
Seventh conference of the Society for the History of Linguistics in the Pacific (SHLP VII) 3–4 August 2020, ANU.
Discourse-Pragmatic Variation and Change (DiPVaC) conference, 3-5 June at the University of Melbourne. See the website for details about plenary speakers, workshops, accommodation and transport.
CoEDL news items
Have you met all of the Centre’s Chief Investigators? In this ‘Meet the CI’ video series out research leaders introduce themselves and their research to the wider world.
Looking back, looking forward – taking stock of the world’s endangered languages. A major review of 25 years in recording, studying and revitalising the world’s endangered languages by Nick Evans and colleagues shows both significant advances and critical shortfalls.
Podcast: In conversation with Professor Nicholas Evans. In this interview, Centre Director Nick Evans sits down with James Grama to talk all things language sciences – and a few things not. You've met Nick the linguist – now meet Nick the human!
A digital ark for language. Right now, a paper dictionary of an Indigenous Australian language has a better chance of long-term preservation than an online dictionary, writes Jane Simpson.
After the success of the Sydney Speaks App in 2017, the team has now created another one – the Australia Speaks App – this time covering more regions from across Australia (from AusTalk data), as well as Sydney (from Sydney Speaks data). Both can be accessed here. These interactive activities allow you test out your perceptions on Australian English, and provide great material for students.
Toksave – Culture Talks podcast connects communities with archives. The PARADISEC team are very excited to announce the launch of a new podcast series where listeners will join musicologist Jodie Kell and archivist Steven Gagau as they host a series of interviews with people who have found personal and cultural connections with collections in the archive.
Alyawarr dictionary makes a comeback. It has been more than 25 years since the first Alyawarr to English Dictionary was compiled by Jenny Green (IAD Press, 1992). On the 8th of November the release of a new, updated and substantially revised second edition was celebrated at Arlparra, in the Utopia homelands.
The Mudburra to English Dictionary was launched in Elliott by Warren Snowdon, federal Member for Lingiari, and is the result of a 40 year collaboration between the Mudburra community of the Northern Territory and linguists, most recently those from CoEDL.
Fully bright Caroline wins prestigious scholarship. Freshly minted Honours graduate Caroline Hendy is anxiously awaiting to see which of her five PhD applications in the United States will be successful after she was awarded a Fulbright Postgraduate Scholarship.
Fond farewells – Finishing PhD students. As the end point of CoEDL appears dimly on the horizon, many of our diverse doctoral students have, or are about to reach the end of their PhD journey. In this series, we asked Yarjis Xueqing Zhong, Mark Richards, Claudia Cialone and Eri Kashima them for their closing reflections.
Attention to gesture a sign of the times. A course presented at the Centre’ Summer School by Professor Trevor Johnston not only delivered a sweeping tour de force of research on sign languages, but highlighted a continuing debate in contemporary scholarship about them.
Publications
The LSA has published the first in a series of special issues for its flagship journal, Language. The special issue on Indigenous Languages is available in two parts – 20th and 21st-Century Perspectives – and include articles by our researchers Tony Woodbury, Nick Evans, Greville Corbett and Carmel O'Shannessy.
West, Angwin, Copland, Arnott & Nelson (2020). ‘Cross-modal emotion recognition and autism-like traits in typically developing children’. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 191, 104737. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2019.104737
Rikke L.Bundgaard-Nielsen and Brett J.Baker (2020) ‘Pause acceptability indicates word-internal structure in Wubuy’, Cognition, Vol 198 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2019.104167
Shruti Ullas, Elia Formisano, Frank Eisner and Anne Cutler (2020), ‘Interleaved lexical and audiovisual information can retune phoneme boundaries’, Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-019-01961-8
Daniels, Don and Greville G. Corbett (2019) ‘Repartitioning’. Language 95, Number 4, 711-750.
Dickson, Greg (2020) ‘Aboriginal English(es)’. In Louisa Willougby and Howard Manns (eds.) Australian English Reimagined: structure, features and developments. Routledge: New York/London. 134-154.
Seamus Donnelly, Patricia Brooks, and Bruce Homer (2019) "Is there a bilingual advantage on interference-control tasks? A multiverse meta-analysis of global reaction time and interference cost." Psychonomic Bulletin and Review. 26 (4): 1122-1147. doi:10.3758/s13423-019-01567-z
Elizabeth Marrkilyi Ellis, Jennifer Green, Inge Kral and Lauren W Reed (2019) ‘Mara yurriku: Western Desert sign languages’ in Australian Aboriginal Studies, No 2.
Paola Escudero, Marina Kalashnikova (2020) ‘Infants use phonetic detail in speech perception and word learning when detail is easy to perceive’, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, Vol 190, February 2020, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022096518304570
Gray, James and Gregor, Tina. (2019). ‘Gender/number syncretism in Yelmek verbal suppletion’, in Cho, Sae-Youn (Ed.), Proceedings of GLOW in Asia XII and SICOGG XXI. (pp. 111-125). http://sicogg.or.kr/GLOW-Asia-12-2019/proceedings/
Evan Kidd and Seamus Donnelly (2020), ‘Individual Differences in First Language Acquisition’ Annual Review of Linguistics, Vol. 6:319-340, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-linguistics-011619-030326
Allegra Cattani, Caroline Floccia, Evan Kidd, Daniela Onofrio, Paola Pettenati, and Virginia Volterra. (2019). "Gestures and words in naming: Evidence from cross-linguistic and cross-cultural comparison." Language Learning 69 (3): 709-746. doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/lang.12346
Elaine Tsoi, Wenchun Yang, Angel Chan, and Evan Kidd (2019) "Mandarin-English speaking bilingual and Mandarin speaking monolingual children’s comprehension of relative clauses." Applied Psycholinguistics. 40 (4) doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0142716419000079
Heath, S., Liddle, J. & Wiles, J. (2019). ‘The Challenges of Designing a Robot for a Satisfaction Survey: Surveying Humans Using a Social Robot’. International Journal of Social Robotics. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-019-00604-0
Loakes, Debbie (2019). ‘Sociophonetics of Australian English’, in Louisa Willoughby & Howard Manns (Eds.) Australian English Reimagined: Structure, features and developments. London: Routledge. 103-119.
Mailhammer, Robert & Ronia Zeidan. 2019. Cross-linguistic influence in bilingual productions of the English past tense in Arabic heritage speakers of Australian English, Linguistics Vanguard 5(1), 1-11
Smirnova, Elena, Robert Mailhammer & Susanne Flach. 2019. The role of atypical constellations in the grammaticalization of German and English passives. Diachronica 36(3), 384-416.
Karen Mulak, Haley Vlach, and Paola Escudero (2019) "Cross-Situational Learning of Phonologically Overlapping Words Across Degrees of Ambiguity." Cognitive Science, 43(5). https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12731
Nordlinger, R. (2019). ‘From body part to applicative: encoding ‘source’ in Murrinhpatha’. Linguistic Typology 23(3): 401-433.
Reed, Lauren and Alan Rumsey (2020). ‘Sign Languages in Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands’, in Kendon, Adam (ed) Sign language in Papua New Guinea: A Primary Sign Language from the Upper Lagaip Valley, Enga Province. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Pp. 141-184.
https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/books/9789027261823
Ronald Planer. 2019. The evolution of languages of thought. Biology and Philosophy. 5 (1): 1-27. doi: 10.1007/s10539-019-9701-3
Ronald Planer, and Peter Godfrey-Smith. 2019. Communication and Representation Understood as Sender-Receiver Coordination. Mind and Language.
Ronald Planer. 2019. What Is Symbolic Cognition? Topoi. 1-12. doi: 10.1007/s11245-019-09670-5
Rojas-Berscia, L. M., & Roberts, S. (2019). Exploring the history of pronouns in South America with computer-assisted methods. Journal of Language Evolution. https://doi.org/10.1093/jole/lzz006
Riedel K, Sarvasy H and Demuth K (2019) ‘The Narrative Past Inflection in Sesotho Child and Child-Directed Speech’. Frontiers in Communication. 4:69. doi: 10.3389/fcomm.2019.00069
Jane Simpson (2019) "The Horwood Memorial Lecture: Learning and speaking First Nations Languages in Australia." Babel: Journal of the Australian Federation of Modern Language Teachers’ Associations. 54: 7-10.
Kim Sterelny. 2019. ‘The Origins of Multi-Level Society’, Topoi 1-14. doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-019-09666-1
Kristyn Sommer, Mark Nielsen, Madeline Draheim, Jonathan Redshaw, Eric Vanman, and Matti Wilks (2019) "Children’s perceptions of the moral worth of live agents, robots, and inanimate objects." Journal of Experimental Child Psychology. 187: 104656. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.JECP.2019.06.009
Martin Blaszczyk
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News from UNE
Thesis completions
Paddy Quinn has been admitted to the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. He had completed his thesis under the supervision of A/Prof Liz Ellis and Emeritus Prof Jeff Siegel, entitled ‘¡Nosotros no hablamos así! ‘We don’t talk like that!’: Perceptions of misrepresentation and the imposition of a linguistic imaginary in popular Colombian telenovelas’
Celia de Burgh has completed her Master’s thesis under the supervision of Dr Inés Antón-Méndez. Her thesis was titled ‘Perception of Indistinct Covert Recordings’.
Congratulations, Paddy and Celia!
Talks and presentations
UNE linguists have really been out and about in the last few months.
Liz Ellis presented a talk entitled “It’s like the root of a tree that I grew up from….”: Parents’ linguistic identity shaping family language policy, far from a speech community at the ALS panel ‘Linguistic diversity in Australian migrant families’.
Arvind Iyengar presented a talk at the UNE HASSE Research Week 2019 (18 – 22 November 2019), entitled ‘The rise and spread of Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics: Perspectives for minority-language writing systems’.
Rafi Saleh will be presenting a talk at The Georgetown University Roundtable (GURT2020) in March, entitled ‘Exploring translanguaging in the English department: Natural or strategic?’. This year’s theme is ‘Multilingualism: Global South and Global North Perspectives’. Rafi also presented at ALAA-ALANZ Conference at Curtain University (talk entitled ‘Applied Linguistics and Language Teaching: Making Connections’) and at the Association for Academic Language and Learning Biennial Conference at Notre Dame University (talk entitled ‘All around the world : international perspectives, research and practice in academic language and learning’).
Sally Dixon will be presenting a talk at the University of Western Australia in February, entitled ‘Embedding variationist perspectives in undergraduate linguistics teaching’. This talk will be delivered via Zoom, as part of both UNE and UWA Linguistics’ commitment to reducing the environmental impact of our work. Sally also presented a talk on integrating research within the context of undergraduate teaching at the ALS pre-conference workshop on teaching linguistics.
Diana Eades taught a course at the CoEDL Summer School in Melbourne in December, entitled ‘Socio and applied linguist: from scholar to expert in court’.
UNE Linguistics Masters student Callum Clayton-Dixon has published Surviving New England: a history of Aboriginal resistance through the first forty years of the colonial apocalypse which was sparked by his own language revival work. Details about ordering can be found on the Facebook page of the Nēwara Aboriginal Corporation, the Anaiwan language revival program. https://www.facebook.com/RevivingAnaiwan/
Congratulations Callum!
In 2020 UNE languages and linguistics continues with our occasional seminar series Language Talks! We kick things off in February with own Rafi Saleh discussing his PhD research on translanguaging. We have several more talks lined up over the months ahead, but if you are visiting up/down this way please get in touch and sign up for a talk!
Other activities of interest
Liz Ellis organised a Round Table on 4th December 2019 on Interpreting/Translation for Emerging Languages in the Context of Regional Humanitarian Settlement.
Armidale has welcomed some 600 new residents from Northern Iraq in the last 2 years, with several hundred more expected. By 2023, at least 50% of the HSP intake will be settled in regional Australia. This presents us with challenges and opportunities in terms of English language teaching and the provision of interpreting services, which was the topic of the Round Table. Participants included representatives from NAATI, Multicultural NSW, Settlement Services International, Northern Settlement Services, the Dept of Human Services, Hunter New England Health and others. This collaboration has led to joint initiatives in research and program provision.
Margaret Sharpe reports that the last proofs for the dictionary of the Gold Coast and Tweed River areas have been sent off and they’re heading for a launch date in April. A set of ten lessons in these dialects was produced last November under Creative Commons.
Sally Dixon
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News from Macquarie University
Macquarie's Master of Applied Linguistics and TESOL ranked top ten internationally
The EL Gazette – the leading English language teaching sector news outlet has announced that Macquarie University’s Master of Applied Linguistics and TESOL has been ranked in the global top ten, at number 9. The listing is based on the QS ranking system. For more information go to: https://www.elgazette.com/elg_archive/ELG2001/mobile/index.html
Forthcoming workshops
Perspectives on language in children with hearing loss
Macquarie University 14-55 May 2020
How do children with hearing loss develop spoken language? As advancements in early identification, devices, fitting and intervention progress, children with hearing loss have better possibilities for functional language use than ever before. Yet challenges remain. This workshop brings together researchers, clinicians, health practitioners and industry representatives from diverse fields to discuss the many perspectives on how children with hearing loss come to be able to acquire and process spoken language.
Keynote Speakers
Register at: bit.ly/workshopmay2020 by 8 May.
‘Qualitative Data Analysis’ at EALTA conference
Professor Mehdi Riazi of Macquarie University will be running a 2-day workshop on ‘qualitative data analysis’ at the 17th EALTA Conference in June 2020 in Budapest, Hungary. The 2-day workshop will engage participants with the theoretical and practical issues related to the coding and analysis of qualitative data. It will include eight sessions focusing on “foundations”, “approaches”, “procedures”, and “tools” in qualitative data analysis. Instruction will include a combination of presentation, discussion and hands-on activities. For more details, go to: http://www.euroexam.com/pre-conference-workshops-sigs
Adam Smith
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News from the University of Adelaide
New publication
Zuckermann, Ghil’ad 2020. Revivalistics: From the Genesis of Israeli to Language Reclamation in Australia and Beyond. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978–0–19–981279–0 (pbk), ISBN 978–0–19–981277–6 (hbk). https://global.oup.com/academic/product/revivalistics-9780199812790?lang=en&cc=us
Ghil’ard Zuckermann
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News from Living Languages
Summer can sometimes be a pretty quiet time for Living Languages (formerly RNLD) training programs, with the desert heat, the tropical Wet and the summer holidays. Nevertheless, we did seem to pack in a number of workshops and other events.
Perhaps the most significant achievement of the past few months was the launch of our Learner's Guide Template, a guide to help Indigenous people create a community-friendly resource about their own language. This exciting new resource, funded by the Federal Government’s Indigenous Languages and Arts program, was a two-year project involving many people: Living Languages staff, a reference group comprised of language workers from four different reclamation and revitalisation languages, and many, many others who volunteered their time. The template combines both instructions to the people who may be writing their own learner’s guide, and sample plain English text that can be adapted and used in their final publication. It is primarily intended for use with revitalisation/reclamation languages of the Pama-Nyungan language family. One of the most innovative aspects of this resource is that it has been developed as a native Google Doc, to better enable group collaboration and editing, and we strongly encourage anybody working with the Template to try out this format and all the advantages it offers over, for example, Microsoft Word docs.
Those of us who worked on this ambitious project are very excited to be finally making it available. You can find out more about the template, and request access, here. Living Languages trainers can also incorporate the template into our training workshops, for communities who would like support to create their learners’ guide.
Besides this exciting development, we have managed to fit in training workshops in Broome, Groote Eylandt, Croker Island, Maningrida, and Brisbane. Alongside Harley Dunolly-Lee from VACL and Sharon Edgar-Jones from Muurrbay, we also delivered a workshop at the CoEDL Summer School in Melbourne, and then reported on the AIATSIS Paper and Talk workshop at the Australian Languages Workshop on Minjerribah/Stradbroke Island in late February with Wakka Wakka language activists Mgurr Narlee and Fred Cobbo.
Coming up in the next couple of months we've got workshops in Barunga, Canberra, Pukatja and Alice Springs, and planning is well under way for our second annual Youth Professional Development workshop to be held in Melbourne in May. Stay tuned!
Anindilyakwa participants at Living Languages workshop Angurugu, Groote Eylandt, Oct 2019
Andrew Tanner
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About ALS
The Australian Linguistic Society is the national organization for linguists and linguistics in Australia. Its primary goal is to further interest in and support for linguistics research and teaching in Australia. Further information about the Society is available by clicking here.
The ALS Newsletter is issued four times per year, in the middle of February, May, August and November. Information for the Newsletter should be sent to the Editor, Joe Blythe (alsonline-at-als.asn.au) by the end of the first week of February, May, August, and November. There is a list of people who are automatically advised that it is time to contribute material; if you wish to be added to that list, send Joe an email.
Membership of ALS includes free subscription to the Australian Journal of Linguistics, which publishes four issues per year. Members are entitled to present papers at the annual conference. ALS membership is handled through the ALS website https://als.asn.au/.
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