06/07/2021

ALS Newsletter July 2021

From the President
ALS Awards and Prizes
New working group
Social Sciences Week (September 6-12)
New Journal – Interactional Linguistics
News from the University of Sydney
News from RMIT Language Studies/Applied Linguistics
News from La Trobe University
News from UNE
News from Griffith University
News from UWA
News from Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education (BIITE)
News from Macquarie University
News from ANU
News from the University of Queensland
News from Western Sydney University
About ALS

From the President

Gosh this is a packed newsletter! I take it as a sign not just of the huge range of linguistic work done through Australian universities, but also of the extension of the scope of what ‘counts’ as linguistics work. And this is not only seen in the traditional academic achievements of grants and publications. That said, we do heartily congratulate our ALS prizewinners and grant recipients – see below.

I also draw your attention to VP Alice Gaby’s call for participation in our Accreditation and Affiliation Working Group, which is developing a way to extend professional linguistics beyond the academy. This is part of a broader strategy to raise public awareness of the work of linguists, and to recognise and support the work that goes on outside of universities. 

A second strand to this strategy is to build a more sustainable model for cooperation across all disciplines pertaining to language and linguists. I am currently in conversations with sister organisations such as ALAA (Applied Linguistics Association of Australia) and LCNAU (Language and Cultures Network for Australian Universities) to speak as one voice on language issues in Australia. We are all small organisations who recognise that our voice will be louder if we are able to claim that we represent a bigger constituency of expertise.

There are historical reasons for the formation of different professional societies, but we should always be reflecting on the utility of, for example, strict divisions between linguistics and applied linguistics, between research on language and teaching languages. These conversations allow us to consider big questions such as linguistic inequality and social inclusion, the value of language education; relationships between language and health and wellbeing, from a range of different methodological and theoretical perspectives.

A third strand of our strategy to broaden the reach of linguistic advocacy is to reflect on ways that our profession itself has engaged in exclusionary practices, and what kinds of organisational and cultural changes we might undertake to be not only a more inclusive Australian Linguistic Society, but also a more outward-looking profession. To develop some clear actions on this, I am currently chairing a Working Party on Social Inclusion, which includes ALS executive members Alice Gaby, Celeste Rodríguez Louro and Jakelin Troy, as well as Louisa Willoughby, Ingrid Piller and Joe Lo Bianco. We expect to have more to report on this initiative by the time of the ALS conference in December 2021. Feel free to contact me if you would like to contribute to this Working Party.

Ilana Mushin

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ALS Awards and Prizes

2021 Research Grant awardees and scholarship winners announced

The 2021 scholarship winners and ALS research grant scheme awardees have now been announced.

The Gerhardt Laves Scholarship to support linguistic fieldwork in Australia and the region by a research student has been awarded to Caroline de Dear (Macquarie) for her project Questions and responses in Gija conversations.

The Jalwang Scholarship for supporting linguists to give back to the community by converting research into materials of benefit to the language speakers has been awarded to Alex Anderson (University of Sydney) for The Gudjal Project.

This years' Susan Kaldor Scholarship to assist students to attend an institute, summer school or similar intensive course has been jointly won by Agnieszka Faron (University of Queensland) to attend the International Summer School on Multilingualism at The University of Greenwich, and Eleanor Yacopetti (University of Western Australia) to participate in the Bininj Kunwok Language Course.

This years' Research Grants scheme has funded four projects:

  • Yanping Li (Western Sydney University) has been awarded a grant for the project Native English Speakers’ Learning of Mandarin Tones in Regionally-accented Mandarin Words.
  • Haoyi Li (ANU) was funded for the project Multimodal Metaphors: the semantics and syntax of tropes in the language and art of Ganalbingu (Djinba).
  • Thomas Saunders and Sarah Laborde (Griffith) received a grant for the Big Nyikina repatriation of audio and video recordings.
  • Hanna Torsh (Macquarie) has been awarded a grant for the project Pride and shame ten years on: Revisiting linguistic identity and family language policy.

The ALS executive congratulates all the awardees and grantees.

2021 Michael Clyne Prize winner

The 2021 Michael Clyne Prize has been awarded to Levi Durbidge for the Monash University thesis Study abroad in multilingual contexts: The linguistic investment and development of Japanese adolescents in and beyond year-long exchange programs. Congratulations Dr Durbidge!

Thesis summary:

Growing populations of students migrating temporarily for academic purposes has led to an urgency in better understanding questions of language contact and learning faced by these populations. However, an ongoing focus on students departing from, or hosted at, higher education institutions in Anglophone countries limits this understanding. Additionally, there is now a recognised need for research which approaches these questions holistically, viewing the individual as a situated and agentive participant in wider transnational and sociocultural environments.

Drawing on Ecological Systems Theory and The Douglas Fir Group’s (2016) Transdisciplinary Framework for SLA in a Multilingual World, this thesis makes visible the complex interrelations between the individual, context and linguistic development as national, linguistic and cultural borders are crossed. The project examines the experiences of 100 Japanese high school students during and after a year embedded in families and schools abroad in countries across Europe, Asia and North and South America, investigating their language development and learning ecologies they encountered. Innovating a methodology that used quantitative survey data to map the representativeness of qualitative interview respondents, multiple cases were selected for intensive thematic and narrative analysis which explored the similarities and particularities of respondent experiences.

Examining the complexities of language learning ecologies across a variety of multilingual and heteroglossic settings revealed a diverse and dynamic range of intertwined factors which affected informants’ linguistic development. Significantly, the thesis identified the importance of specific, ‘key individuals’, such as host mothers and peers at school, in providing affective, instrumental and embedded support in shaping informants’ investment in host language practices. Local migrant communities also emerged as pivotal in cases where informants experienced discrimination and marginalisation on account of their minority status. Digital communication technology was crucial in mediating participation in host peer communities, concomitantly facilitating the development of teenage linguistic repertoires and integration into these communities. Technology also offered affordances for strategic language learning that allowed informants to negotiate participation and belonging in environments where multilingual competencies were required to move between communities. The results also underscored the longer-term importance of home community and individual agency in the maintenance of these competencies after returning. Informants found their international experience could be a source of othering in the schools they returned to in Japan, while their multilingual competencies were often unvalued. Combined with exam performance pressures, desire to invest in host language practices often diminished significantly in the year after returning.

Overall, the thesis is noteworthy for its ecological treatment of host and home environments, accentuating the complex, intertwined individual and social factors which affect the experiences of short-term academic migrants. Understanding the entanglement of these factors is crucial to promoting belonging and investment among those entering new communities and highlighting the need for multilingual and transcultural competence to be valued if that investment is to be maintained.

Bill Palmer

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New working group

The Australian Linguistics Society has established a new working group, with the goal of making the ALS more relevant to linguists, language workers, and other stakeholders in linguistic research outside the university sector. This working group will explore establishing a process of accreditation of linguistics graduates, as well as affiliate and other membership categories. The current membership of the Accreditation and Affiliation Working Group is: Alice Gaby (ALS VP and working group chair), Jakelin Troy (U Sydney), James Bednall (Batchelor Institute), Cathy Bowe (Charles Darwin U) and Sally Dixon (UNE).

We welcome new members of the working group, especially including people who are likely to seek accreditation, or who are in workplaces that might employ accredited linguists in the future. We also welcome new AAWG members outside academic employment, who might be interested in joining the ALS as affiliates or other membership categories. Current membership of ALS is not a requirement for joining the AAWG.

Alice Gaby

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Social Sciences Week (September 6-12)

Social Sciences Week is an initiative of the Council for Humanities and Social Sciences, aimed at raising the profile of the Social Sciences as Science Week does for the non-social (?) sciences. We are being invited to arrange activities to engage and inform the non-linguist public (old and young) during this week that can be badged as part of Social Sciences Week. These could include public lectures, school-based activities, publication of pieces in the maintream media. I invite all members to consider local and national ways we can be active during Social Sciences week. Please contact ALS (info@als.asn.au ) if you would like more information or you have ideas for activities that could be rolled out locally or nationally. 

Ilana Mushin

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New Journal – Interactional Linguistics (https://benjamins.com/catalog/il)

We invite people to consider submitting their interactionally oriented linguistics research to this brand-new journal – the first to specialise in the emerging field of “Interactional Linguistics”. The journal is edited by Ilana Mushin (University of Queensland) and Simona Pekarek Doehler (Université de Neuchâtel)

In the past two decades, usage-based approaches to linguistic inquiry have forged an empirically grounded comprehension of language as locally contingent, temporal, and ever-adaptive. Interactionally-oriented approaches to the study of language have evidenced both how linguistic structures function as resources for organizing social interaction, and, conversely, how social interaction shapes linguistic structures. Interactional Linguistics aims to advance our understanding of this symbiotic relationship between language and social interaction, contributing to a more encompassing comprehension of what language is, in light of its use within the dynamics of social interaction. This fully peer-reviewed journal publishes original research that demonstrates how close scrutiny of linguistic structures as they occur in social interaction can deepen our appreciation of the functional and formal aspects of language, be it within a single language or cross-linguistically. The journal publishes qualitative and quantitative research and welcomes empirical as well as theoretical arguments.

The first issue of this new international journal for research on linguistics and social interaction is now available in open access for all to peruse: https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/26664232. Future issues will operate on a hybrid model, allowing open access and subscription access options.

Ilana Mushin

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News from the University of Sydney

Student presentations

Two USyd Linguistics PhD students presented at the recent 30th Meeting of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society (SEALS 30), held online and now accessible to all. The conference program, papers, and presentations can be found here:

https://sites.google.com/site/sealsjournal/seals-and-jseals-history/seals-online-2021/seals-2021-program

Staff news

Yankee Modi and Mark Post were awarded a grant from the Firebird Foundation for Anthropological Research to establish a Centre for Cultural-Linguistic Diversity (Eastern Himalaya). The CCLD-EH will run research training and engagement and language documentation programs in the Eastern Himalayan region (northeast India and surrounds) for an initial 4-year period, with primary support going to Indigenous community-member researchers. 

Gwendolyn Hyslop is embarking on a year-long research project at Humboldt University, Berlin, to take up a Fellowship for Experienced Researchers with the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. The primary aim of the project is to put forward and test hypotheses regarding the prehistory of East Bodish speaking populations in the Eastern Himalaya, looking through both linguistic and ethnographic lenses. She will be working closely with Anthropologist Prof Toni Huber and his students.

Monika Bednarek presented a paper titled “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander television characters: Putting the spotlight on language” at the International Conference of the European Association for Studies of Australia (EASA 2021, online), University of Naples 'L’Orientale', Italy, 9 March-1 April 2021

Monika Bednarek is the University of Sydney's academic lead in a new research collaboration with the University of Queensland and AARNet on building the Australian Text Analytics Platform (ATAP), funded by the ARDC, project lead Prof. Michael Haugh, UQ.

Two recent publications from Monika:

Bednarek, M., Werner, V. and M. Veirano Pinto (eds.) (2021) Special issue of the International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 26/1 on Corpus Approaches to Telecinematic Language. https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.26.1

Bednarek, M., Caple, H. & C. Huan (2021) Computer-based analysis of news values: A case study on national day reporting. Journalism Studies 22/6: 702-722. https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2020.1807393

Nick Enfield’s book “The Languages of Mainland Southeast Asia” was published in the Cambridge University Press ‘Green Series’ (Cambridge Language Surveys) in April: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/languages-of-mainland-southeast-asia/43B7A92948482AD1A01E7707E1EDF239

The book—a culmination of many years’ fieldwork, research, and writing on the area—expands significantly on Nick’s 2019 book ‘Mainland Southeast Asian Languages: A Concise Typological introduction’, with the addition of descriptive topics and data, and with major new chapters on the history and social make-up of the mainland Southeast Asia region and on the historical-comparative linguistics of the area.

Nick Enfield

Nick Enfield

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News from RMIT Language Studies/Applied Linguistics

Recent publications

Books

Comer, Joe. (In press.) Discourses of Global Queer Mobility and the Mediatization of Equality. Routledge. [Release date in September 2021] https://www.routledge.com/Discourses-of-Global-Queer-Mobility-and-the-Mediatization-of-Equality/Comer/p/book/9780367521721

Journal articles

Qi, Jing, Manathunga, C., Singh, M. & Bunda, T. (2021). Transcultural and First Nations doctoral education and epistemological border-crossing: histories and epistemic justice. Teaching in Higher Education, 1 – 14.

Qi, Jing. (2021). China’s international higher education policies 2010-2019: Multiple logics and HEI responses. Higher Education, 1 – 18.

Manathunga, C., Qi, Jing, Bunda, T., Singh, M. (2021; 2019 Online). Time mapping: charting transcultural and First Nations histories and geographies in doctoral education. Discourse, 42, 215 – 233.

Shahzadi, Amina (HDR candidate), Abdul Ghaffar Bhatti & Munir Khan. (2021). Speech Acts across Cultures: A Comparative Study of Chinese and Pakistani Students’ Request and Politeness Strategies. Sir Syed Journal of Education & Social Research (SJESR), 4(2): 1-12. DOI: 10.36902/sjesr-vol4-iss2-2021(1-12)

Shahzadi, Amina (HDR candidate) & Ghazala Kausar. (2020). Using Social Media to Improve Students' English Writing Skills: A Mixed Method Study. Journal of Research in Social Sciences (JRSS), 8(1), pp.124-140. DOI https://doi.org/www.numl.edu.pk/journals/jrss

Shahzadi, Amina (HDR candidate), Ayesha Asghar & Saira Javed. (2019). Effectiveness of Corpus in Teaching English Synonyms. Corporum: Journal of Corpus Linguistics (CJCL), 2(1), pp.51-65.

Muhammad Afzaa, Munir Khan, Abdul Bhatti & Shahzadi, Amina (HDR candidate). (2019). Discourse and Corpus based Analysis of Doctor-Patient Conversation in the Context of Pakistani Hospitals. European Online Journal of Natural and Social Sciences, 8(4), pp.732-752.

Book chapters

Manathunga, C., Bunda, T., Singh, M., Qi, Jing. (2020). Indigenizing the higher degree research space. In Trimmer, Karen, Hoven, Debra, & Keskitalo, Pigga (eds). Indigenous Postgraduate Education, Information Age Publishing, Charlotte, North Carolina, United States.

Manathunga, C., Qi, Jing, Bunda, T. & Singh, M. (2021). Working towards future epistemic justice: incorporating transcultural and Indigenous knowledge systems in doctoral education. In Anne Lee, Rob Bongaardt (eds.). The Future of Doctoral Research: Challenges and Opportunities, Routledge, United Kingdom.

Conference presentations

Comer, Joe. Materializing and mobilizing pride: Love and other ‘word-things’ in transnational LGBTQ advocacy discourse. Sociolinguistics Symposium 23, Hong Kong, June 2021.

Comer, Joe. Together soon enough’: Melbourne’s affective-discursive landscape during and since lockdown. Contribution to workshop ‘Linguistic Landscapes of COVID-19’, online, June 2021.

Crozet, Chantal. ‘New’ Gender Wars: The Feminization and Neutralization of the French Language. ISFAR@35 Symposium, RMIT University/online, April 2021.

Mullan, Kerry & Arab, Reza (Griffith University). Having fun is a matter of taste: “FUNNY” words in French and Persian. Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) Workshop, ANU/online, April 2021.

Mullan, Kerry & Sadow, Lauren (ANU/Macquarie University) for Peeters, Bert† (ANU). J'ai mal à la tête, me duele la cabeza et tours analogues dans les langues-cultures romanes et en anglaise. International conference, Lexique et corps humain, CREE, INALCO & ATLIF CNRS, Paris/online, June 2021.

Mullan, Kerry & de Saint Léger, Diane (University of Melbourne). Decolonising the gaze: using the semiotic landscape as an opportunity for learning in New Caledonia. ISFAR@35 Symposium, RMIT University/online, April 2021.

Mullan, Kerry & David, Caroline (UPV Montpellier 3); and Poussard, Cécile (UPV Montpellier 3), Vincent-Durroux, Laurence (Université Grenoble Alpes) and Béal, Christine (UPV Montpellier 3)). LED2021, La référence: (co-)construction et exploitation, Université Grenoble-Alpes/online, March 2021.

Mullan, Kerry & Qi, Jing. Quality teaching in community language schools: Teacher funds of knowledge. Teacher Quality and School Improvement, Beijing Normal University, the University of Durham and Monash University Joint Online Conference, February 2021.

Kerry Mullan

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News from La Trobe University

Prof Marija Tabain has served as a consultant on the Victorian government’s Early Childhood Languages Program (bilingual kindergarten), which has been extended to the end of 2022 based on the interim evaluation reports.

James Walker

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News from UNE

Diana Eades gave expert linguistic evidence in June in the Federal Court, in the civil litigation by ASIC (Australian Securities and Investment Commission) against three companies and an individual in relation to phone sales of life insurance and accidental injury insurance to Aboriginal people in remote communities (NSD1447/2019 ASIC v Select AFSL Pty Ltd & Ors). In preparing her lengthy report to the Court about 50 phone calls with 9 consumers, Diana was assisted by Alex Bowen, who is now a PhD student in Linguistics at Melbourne University.

Sally Dixon gave an invited colloquium at the German Collaborative Research Centre "Register" titled Understanding complex repertoires in situations of language contact: an application of the Comparative Variationist method.

Publication:

Dixon, S, (2021) Multilingual repertoires at play: structure and function in re-ported speech utterances of Alyawarr children. Languages 6 (79) https://doi.org/10.3390/languages6020079

Finex Ndhlovu (with Torun Reite, Dalarna University, Sweden) was on a panel on Decolonising, Unsettling and Rebuilding Sociolinguistics at the 23rd e-Sociolinguistics Symposium (e-SS23), University of Hong Kong, 7-10 June 2021. Title of paper: Defying Common Sense – Ethno-Tales of Economic Rationalism in our Field.  

Congratulations to the following students for having successfully completed their MA theses: 

Megan Gartside, Simpel, kan? Class, Culture, and Communicative Function: Factors Influencing Translanguaging Practices in South Jakarta

Supervisor: Finex Ndhlovu

Aravinda Jayasundara, Differential Object Marking in Sinhala: A Preliminary Study of the Accusative Suffix -wǝ Based on a Spoken Corpus

Supervisor: Arvind Iyengar

Linda McIntosh, Theorising language attitudes in the border lands: The case of Albury-Wodonga communities

Supervisor: Finex Ndhlovu

Philip Swan, Mark my words! Writing Namblong, according to Namblong, by Namblong, for Namblong

Supervisor: Arvind Iyengar

Cindy Schneider

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News from Griffith University

We missed the February Newsletter (sorry!), so the following includes stuff we should have reported then. 

Grants

Cliff Goddard was awarded an ARC Discovery Project (2021-2024) titled ‘The building blocks of meaning’, along with colleagues Zhengdao Ye (ANU), Ulla Vanhatalo (U. Helsinki), and David Bullock (U. Washington).

HDR news

Dr. Reza Arab had his PhD conferred in February 2021. His thesis was titled: ‘To Be with Salt, To Speak with Taste: Metapragmatics of Playful Speech Practices in Persian’.

Publications

Bromhead, Helen. 2021. Disaster linguistics, climate change semantics and public discourse studies: A semantically-enhanced discourse study of 2011 Queensland Floods. Language Sciences 85:101381.

Diget, Ida Stevia. 2021. Minimal English for health: Reader accessibility in public health communication about COVID-19 in Australia (with contrastive reference to Denmark). In Goddard, C. (ed.) Minimal Languages in Action, pp281-318 Palgrave Macmillan. 

Goddard, Cliff (ed.). 2021. Minimal Languages in Action. Palgrave Macmillan. [www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783030640767]

Goddard, Cliff. 2021. In praise of minimal languages. In Goddard, C. (ed.) Minimal Languages in Action, pp1-16. Palgrave Macmillan. 

Goddard, Cliff and Sadow, Lauren. 2021. “It’s the economy, stupid”: The everyday semantics of a geopolitical key word. Journal of Postcolonial Linguistics 5(1), 226-238.

Goddard, Cliff, Vanhatalo, Ulla, Hane, Amie A. and Welch, Martha G. 2021. Adapting the Welch Emotional Connection Screen (WECS) into Minimal English and seven other minimal languages. In Goddard, C. (ed.) Minimal Languages in Action, pp225-254. Palgrave Macmillan.

Goddard, Cliff and Wierzbicka, Anna. 2021. Semantics in the time of coronavirus: “Virus”, “bacteria”, “germs”, “disease” and related concepts. Russian Journal of Linguistics, 25(1), 7-23 [DOI: 10.22363/2687‐0088‐2021‐25‐1‐7‐23] Open Access.

Goddard, Cliff and Wierzbicka, Anna. 2021. “We”: Conceptual semantics, linguistic typology and social cognition. Language Sciences 83 101327 (January 2021) 

Machin, Elita. 2021. Minimal English and revitalisation education: Assisting linguists to explain grammar in simple, everyday words. In Goddard, C. (ed.) Minimal Languages in Action, pp83-107. Palgrave Macmillan. 

Rarrick, Samantha. 2020. Sinasina Sign Language (Chimbu, Papua New Guinea) - Language Snapshot. Language and Description 19, 79-86

Other publication news

The first volume in the fully open access book series Current Issues on Bilingualism (Language Science Press) has been published. Susana Eisenchlas is among the series editors. This book series is completely free for both authors and readers and publishes cutting-edge research on individual and societal bilingualism. Further submissions are welcomed. http://langsci-press.org/catalog/series/cib

Conferences

Bromhead, Helen and Goddard, Cliff. 2020. How meanings help and hinder climate action in Australia: Three lexical case studies. Annual Conference of Australian Linguistic Society (ALS), online. 14-15 December 2020. [available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmuVH-TMWa8]

Goddard, Cliff. 2021. “Minimal language” and COVID-19: How to talk about complex ideas using simple words. 68th Annual Conference of Korean Language and Literature International Conference. February 18, 2021.

Goddard, Cliff and Wierzbicka, Anna. 2021. Re-thinking “PARTS”. NSMCon-2021 April 16, 2021.

Rarrick, Samantha. 2021. "Is Sinasina Sign Language an Isolate?: A call for further sign language documentation & description in Papua New Guinea". International Conference on Language Documentation & Conservation (ICLD7), March 5, 2021.

Rarrick, Samantha. 2020. When a sign language isn’t a ‘language’: ‘language’, tok, and Sinasina Sign Language”. Annual Conference of Australian Linguistic Society (ALS), December 16.

Community engagement

Griffith & UQ jointly hosted Queensland's National Round of OzCLO 2021 on March 24 at Griffith's Southbank Campus. In the first round, 79 teams competed in Queensland. 6 of these teams moved on to the National Round.

Susana Eisenchlas has been active in promoting the benefits of bi/multilingualism in migrant and refugee communities in Australia through public talks and workshops at schools and libraries. She has facilitated workshops for the Multicultural Development Association (MDA), Inclusion Support QLD, First 5 Forever Library Program (Brisbane City Council Libraries), among others.

Cliff Goddard

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News from UWA

Welcome

UWA Linguistics welcomes Dr Mitch Browne as a Discipline adjunct. Mitch has recently completed his PhD in Linguistics, titled ‘A Grammatical description of Warlmanpa: A Ngumpin-Yapa language spoken around Tennant Creek (Northern Territory)’ at The University of Queensland.

PhD completion

Congratulations to soon-to-be Amy Budrikis who has passed her PhD thesis examination with flying colours. Her thesis is titled ‘New speakers’ perspectives on reinstating the intergenerational transmission of endangered Indigenous languages in Western Australia’ supervised by Marie-Eve Ritz, John Henderson, Len Collard and Maïa Ponsonnet.

HDR student updates

Connor Brown is continuing analysis for his PhD thesis, which investigates temporal and aspectual semantics in an eastern Kimberley variety of Kriol. Lately, he has been focusing on aspectual inflections on the verb, along with past tense marking.

Madeleine Clews is continuing to develop her PhD proposal investigating the language ecology of English in Western Australia and has just returned from an expedition to the National Library of Australia and the State Library of Victoria to explore early colonial records not available in the West. She is also writing, with Celeste Rodríguez Louro and Glenys Collard, an article on the indigenisation of SAY in Aboriginal English.

Troy Reynolds is nearing completion of the EmuR database for his PhD thesis, having recently expanded the dataset significantly, and is preparing for the analysis stage of his first component study. Troy is also writing, with Celeste Rodríguez Louro and Glenys Collard, an invited chapter on Australian Aboriginal English for the Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of World Englishes edited by Kate Burridge and Carolin Biewer.

Eleonor Yacopetti started her PhD in May, working on descriptions of space in Kune with Maïa Ponsonnet and Bill Palmer, in association with the ‘Landscape, language and culture in Indigenous Australia’ Australian Research Council Discovery Project. Eleanor is also preparing for her first fieldwork trip under this project, to take place in September 2021.

Lucía Fraiese is currently completing a HDR Prelim in preparation for PhD admission next year. She is working on utterance-final tags in Australian Aboriginal English under the guidance of Dr Celeste Rodríguez Louro and Glenys Collard.

Staff updates

Amanda Hamilton-Hollaway continues her one-year lecturing position at UWA and is teaching three units during the second semester of 2021. She has also recently returned from Elliott, NT, where she helped organise a week-long series of workshops on how to use the Mudburra-to-English Dictionary. These workshops, which were funded by a CoEDL Transdisciplinary and Innovation Grant, were organised collaboratively by Amanda, Mudburra educator Janey Dixon, and University of Queensland CoEDL researchers Samantha Disbray and Felicity Meakins. They were delivered to Mudburra and non-Indigenous school staff members, and they aimed to familiarise these participants with the contents of the dictionary while also providing ideas on how to incorporate it into classroom activities.

Awards

UWA Linguistics won an Excellence in Teaching Award for Approaches to Teaching and the Support of Learning that influence, motivate and inspire students to learn! Here is the nomination that kick started this win:

The Discipline of Linguistics at UWA offers outstanding mentoring, support, encouragement and inspiration to student and it leads a growing major in the School of Social Sciences.

UWA Linguistics wins an Excellence in Teaching Award

UWA Linguistics wins an Excellence in Teaching Award! From left to right: Marie-Eve Ritz, Maia Ponsonnet, Amanda Hamilton-Hollaway, Luisa Miceli and Celeste Rodriguez Louro.

Eleanor Yacopetti is a joint recipient of the 2021 Susan Kaldor Scholarship. Eleanor has received ALS support to attend the Bininj Kunwok Online – Kunwinjku short course (Yekke) in preparation for fieldwork later this year.

Publications

O'Shannessy, Carmel & Connor Brown. 2021. Reflexive and Reciprocal Encoding in the Australian Mixed Language, Light Warlpiri. Languages 6: 105. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages6020105   

Ritz, Marie-Eve & Richard, Sophie. (2021). The functions of the auxiliary ‘have’ in Australian English vivid narratives. In M. Fryd & K. M. Eide (Eds.), The Perfect volume (pp. 462-478). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Rodríguez Louro, Celeste & Glenys Collard (2021). Working together: Sociolinguistic research in urban Aboriginal Australia. Journal of Sociolinguistics.

Rodríguez Louro, Celeste & Glenys Collard (2021). Australian Aboriginal English: Linguistic and sociolinguistic perspectives. Language and Linguistics. Cass.

Presentations and invited talks

Troy Reynolds was invited to speak about language acquisition with a group of 11 primary and secondary school teachers at Morley Senior High School on 17 June 2021.

Celeste Rodríguez Louro was a keynote speaker at an event organised by Sender Dovchin (Curtin University), at Edith Cowan University and funded by the WA Department of Communities. The title of her presentation was ‘The superpowers of culturally and linguistically diverse women’.

Luisa Miceli participated in the first Global Australian Languages Workshop organised by Claire Bowern (Yale University) on 17 May 2021, contributing to a session titled ‘A Conversation about Sound Change’ with Erich Round and Claire Bowern. In the same event, Maïa Ponsonnet was a co-author for two presentations related to the ‘Landscape, Language and Culture in Indigenous Australia’ Discovery Project led by Bill Palmer. 

Linguistics and careers

Our work integrated learning unit, first introduced in 2020, is proving to be popular with our undergraduate cohort. Four more students have just left for their winter break placements. Two will be spending 3 weeks at Irra Wangga Language Centre in Geraldton, one will be partly at Irra Wangga and partly based at UWA’s Berndt Museum where she will assist staff in archiving the language collection. This week they are all involved in the running of a big regional language expo (see photo below when they met with language centre staff for planning prior to their departure!). Another student has left for Kununurra where and will be based at Mirima Dawang Woorlab-gerring Language and Culture Centre for 4 weeks. We have also organised internships with other industry partners, including the Western Australian Department of Education.

UWA Linguistics Interns

UWA Linguistics interns Khatijah, Daniella and Erin planning their placement at Irra Wangga Language Centre with hosts Jacqui and Dana.

Consultancies

Glenys Collard and Celeste Rodríguez Louro are collaborating with the Heart Foundation in the creation of medical media for Indigenous communities. Collaboration with the Heart Foundation will result in a soon-to-be released second video fully scripted by Collard in Aboriginal English encouraging people to be mindful of heart attack signs. This collaboration has also given rise to the following conference submission (currently under consideration):

Smith, Julie, Tanya Battaglia, Glenys Collard, Celeste Rodríguez Louro & Shelley McRae (2021). An Aboriginal English animation to encourage heart checks.  Rural Medicine Australia Conference. Perth, 20-23 October 2021.

Glenys Collard and Celeste Rodríguez Louro are also providing consultancy for the UWA Centre for Rural Health both in research methods and the production of media addressing domestic violence in the Pilbara, WA – all in Aboriginal English.

Media

Maïa Ponsonnet published a Friday essay in The Conversation: https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-my-belly-is-angry-my-throat-is-in-love-how-body-parts-express-emotions-in-indigenous-languages-156962

The essay was also relayed by phys.org. https://phys.org/news/2021-04-belly-angry-throat-body-emotions.html

Maïa Ponsonnet was interviewed by Ruth Hessey for Eastside FM’s Monday Drive. You can listen to it here, around min 85: https://eastsidefm.org/podcast/my-belly-is-angry-my-throat-is-in-love/

Social media

Lucía Fraiese is social media person for the ALS. She is currently looking for advanced PhD students and ECRs to showcase their research projects. If you are a PhD student or ECR and would like to be featured on ALS Twitter please contact Lucía on lucia.fraiese@research.uwa.edu.au

Celeste Rodríguez Luoro

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News from Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education (BIITE)

Welcome

Dr James Bednall has joined Batchelor Institute as a lecturer in linguistics. He arrives in Darwin from Groote Eylandt, where he has been working to support Warnumamalya communities facilitate Anindilyakwa language maintenance projects. James’ background involves teaching, research and community engagement in both the university and not-for-profit sectors (in particular, working with community organisations across WA and the NT). His research focuses on language documentation and description practices, community-led language revitalisation and maintenance, and the interfaces between morphosyntax, semantics and pragmatics. James will be coordinating units in the Languages and Linguistics Major in the Bachelor of Arts (WARTS2) and the Diploma of Arts (YARTS1). Welcome to the team, James!

Presentations

"Ngketya nwerna nema nwernakenha – Our language is who we are"

Vanessa Farrelly who works for Batchelor Institute’s Centre for Australian Languages and Linguistics (CALL) is project managing a successful Master-Apprentice Program (MAP), a methodology developed by Native American Communities in the US to create new fluent speakers of endangered Indigenous languages.

Pertame Master Elder and apprentices presented at the Batchelor Institute's Indigenous Knowledges Seminar Series on the 25th of March and provided an insight into the "Pertame Master-Apprentice Program", to grow the next generation of fluent Pertame speakers. You can watch the presentation on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-gUgHnL2pk&list=PL9EheJ9ptF48AvvHoMx6Ziyk8VRTZNekx&index=2

The Pertame team also presented the Pertame MAP at the National Indigenous Research Conference within the 2021 AIATSIS Summit in Adelaide in May.

Batchelor Press Language Projects

Buwaray Rahkurayku – Gälpu Dhäruk (Gälpu Word Book)

The soon-to-be-launched publication Buwaray Rahkurayku – Gälpu Dhäruk (Gälpu Word Book) represents 20 years in the making and is a legacy to the late language worker (Marilyn) Ganyinurr Gurruwiwi (1952 – 2002) who completed much of the initial translation and editing work. Published by the Literature Production Centre (LPC), Shepherdson College, Galiwin’ku (Elcho Island), the publication’s later production stage has included Batchelor Institute Press in final layout and print production. The publication resists classification as a dictionary. Its emphasis is on Gälpu words arranged according to the Yolŋu alphabet and with meanings articulated through conversational text and illustrations. In total 1738 word-stories are included. The publication has involved a large team of Gälpu language contributors (including Ganyinurru’s children and sister [Sandra] Dhäŋgaḻ 2 Gurruwiwi), among others, and linguist Melanie Wilkinson as Language Resource Officer (East Arnhem) for the NT Department of  Education. Copies available via the LPC: t: 08 8987 9044; e: lpc.shepherdson@education.nt.gov.au

Buwaray Rahkurayku

Mookanunganuk

Alongside the Living and Breathing Kungarakan project, Batchelor Institute Press has also published an anthology of poetry, Mookanunganuk, by widely-acclaimed Kungarakany elder Kathy Mills OAM. The book takes its title after the Kungarakany concept of regeneration as symbolised by the passage of the waterlily from muddy depths to sunlit flower. Mookanunganuk represents Kathy Mills’s first poetry anthology although her poems have been variously published and recited over the years. The anthology brings together previously published and unpublished work grouped into five themes: Culture, Women, Personal/Family, Politics and Tributes. The poems are written in English although several incorporate Kungarakany and Gurindji language – Gurindji being the author’s cultural affiliation through her mother. Available in hard/softcover through Batchelor Institute Press: batchelorpress.com/node/398

Mookanunganuk

Barunga Festival

Batchelor Institute had a great time at Barunga Festival 2021. Eight Batchelor staff travelled out to Barunga for the 3-day event, where they talked to and engaged with the local community and other visitors who travelled from across Australia to attend. The team had a stall at the festival to increase awareness of the courses Batchelor runs, and to showcase some of the books and resources published by Batchelor Institute Press.

Barunga Festival

Left to right: Debra Dank, Andrew Freak, Paola Fischer, James Bednall.

Courses taught

BIITE (in partnership with CDU) continues to offer a Languages and Linguistics major with a focus on Australian Indigenous languages, in the Bachelor of Arts (WARTS2) and the Diploma of Arts (YARTS1). In Semester 2 (starts 9 August 2021), we have the following units on offer:

All courses are offered online for external students and cross-institutional enrolments are possible. Our Indigenous students come to Batchelor campus for an intensive face-to-face delivery. For information on our Linguistics units, please get in touch with Paola Fischer (paola.fischer@batchelor.edu.au or (08) 8964 6028) or James Bednall (james.bednall@batchelor.edu.au or (08) 8964 7123). For Arrernte language courses, please get in touch with Angela Harrison (angela.harrison@batchelor.edu.au or (08) 8951 8344).

Enrolments for Semester 2 are open now!

Paola Fischer

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News from Macquarie University

Fieldwork

Joe Blythe is compiling this newsletter from Wadeye, NT. It a great privilege to be here on Murrinhpatha country, especially in the middle of the Covid pandemic. The NT borders were closed to Sydney residents a week after he arrived. Joe is conducting fieldwork in Wadeye on the OzSpace project (OzSpace: Landscape and language in Indigenous Australia) and in the east Kimberley region of Western Australia on the CIARA project.

Fieldwork

From left to right: Wadeye residents Jeremiah Tunmuck, Ian Tunmuck, Raphael Tunmuck and Gabriel Mardigan showing us all where it’s at.

CIARA team member Caroline de Dear is 2021 winner of ALS’s Gerhardt Laves scholarship to support linguistic fieldwork. Caroline’s PhD research is on Questions and their responses in Gija conversation.

Dr Hanna Torsh wins an ALS Research Grant

Pride and shame ten years on: Revisiting linguistic identity and family language policy

This project aims to re-interview fourteen mixed language couples who were originally interviewed in 2012-2013 for Hanna's PhD in 2012-13, entitled Between pride and shame: Linguistic intermarriage in Australia from the perspective of the English-dominant partner. The study aims to understand how parental linguistic identities change over time and potentially intersect with child language development, and how family language policy changes over time in response to micro- and macro-level social process and ‘mudes’, or phases of life. This project is significant because it will focus on parents’ experiences in a period of life when young children who have acquired two languages as infants often abandon their heritage language in favour of the dominant societal language, here English. This research will add to our knowledge of language in the family in two ways: (1) by contributing to the literature on parental linguistic identities in multilingual families and (2) by adding a longitudinal dimension to the original research which accounts more fully for the ways in which phases of life affect linguistic practices and repertoires for both adults and children.

Publications

Alhanbali, S., Munro, K.J., Dawes, P., Perugia, E. and Millman, R.E., 2021. Associations between pre-stimulus alpha power, hearing level and performance in a digits-in-noise task. International Journal of Audiology, pp.1-8.

Badajoz-Davila, J., & Buchholz, J. M. (2021). Effect of Test Realism on Speech-in-noise Outcomes in Bilateral Cochlear Implant Users. Ear and Hearing. Advance online publication.

Bavin, E. L., Sarant, J., Leigh, G., Busby, P., Peterson, C., Buzhardt, J., Hackworth, N., Bennetts, S. (2021). Positive parenting behaviours: Impact on the early vocabulary of infants/toddlers with cochlear implants. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, E-Pub ahead of print. doi.org/10.1044/2020_JSLHR-20-00401

Ching, T. Y. C., & Leigh, G. (2021). Considering the impact of Universal Newborn Hearing Screening and early intervention on language outcomes for children with congenital hearing loss. Journal of Hearing, Balance, and Communication, E-Pub ahead of print. doi: 10.1080/21695717.2020.1846923

Dawes, P., Leroi, I., Chauhan, N., Han, W., Harbishettar, V., Jayakody, D.M., Jones, L., Konstantinou, A., Maharani, A., Martini, A. and Politis, A., 2021. Hearing and vision health for people with dementia in residential long term care: Knowledge, attitudes and practice in England, South Korea, India, Greece, Indonesia and Australia. International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry.

Dawes, P., Munro, K.J., Frank, T.L., Moore, D.R., Armitage, C., Marsden, A., Lees, J. and Dillon, H., 2021. Uptake of internet-delivered UK adult hearing assessment. International Journal of Audiology, pp.1-5.

Holt, R., Bruggeman, L., & Demuth, K. (2021). Children with hearing loss can predict during sentence processing. Cognition, 212, 104684. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104684 

Leigh, G. & Crowe, K. (2021). Evidence-based practices for teaching learners who are deaf or hard-of-hearing in regular classrooms. In U. Sharma & S. Salend (Eds.), The Oxford Encyclopaedia of Inclusive and Special Education. New York: Oxford University Press. E-Pub ahead of print. doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.013.1258

Leroi, I., Chauhan, N., Hann, M., Jones, L., Prew, S., Russell, G., Sturrock, R.A., Taylor, J., Worthington, M. and Dawes, P., 2021. Sensory Health for Residents with Dementia in Care Homes in England: A Knowledge, Attitudes, and Practice Survey. Journal of the American Medical Directors Association.

Leroi, I., Wolski, L., Charalambous, A.P., Constantinidou, F., Renaud, D., Dawes, P., Hann, M., Himmelsbach, I., Miah, J., Payne, M. and Simkin, Z., 2021. Support care needs of people with hearing and vision impairment in dementia: a European cross-national perspective. Disability and Rehabilitation, pp.1-13.

Lukin, Annabelle. 2021. When it comes to media reporting on Israel-Palestine, there is nowhere to hide. The Conversation.

Maharani, A., Dawes, P., Nazroo, J., Tampubolon, G., Pendleton, N., & SENSE-Cog WP1 group. (2021). Healthcare system performance and socioeconomic inequalities in hearing and visual impairments in 17 European countries. European Journal of Public Health31(1), 79-86.

McCarthy, M., Leigh, G. & Arthur-Kelly, M. (2021). Practitioners’ self-assessment of family-centered practice in telepractice versus in-person early intervention. Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, 26(1), 46–57. doi: doi.org/10.1093/deafed/enaa028

McCarthy, M., Leigh, G., & Arthur-Kelly, M. (2020). Comparison of caregiver engagement in telepractice and in-person family-centered early intervention. Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education25(1), 33-42. doi: 10.1093/deafed/enz037.

Pierzycki, R. H., Edmondson-Jones, M., Dawes, P., Munro, K. J., Moore, D. R., & Kitterick, P. T. (2021). Associations between hearing health and well-being in unilateral hearing impairment. Ear and hearing42(3), 520-530.

Salins, A., Castles, A., Leigh, G., &  Cupples, L. (2021, in press). Orthographic facilitation of oral vocabulary acquisition in children with hearing loss. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research.

Weisser, A., Miles, K., Richardson, M. J., & Buchholz, J. M. (2021). Conversational distance adaptation in noise and its effect on signal-to-noise ratio in realistic listening environments. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America149(4), 2896-2907.

Xu Rattanasone, N., Yuen, I., Holt, R., & Demuth, K. (2021). Jellybeans… or jelly, beans…? 5-6-year-olds can identify the prosody of compounds but not lists. Journal of Child Language. doi: 10.1017/S0305000921000234 

Yuen, I., Xu Rattanasone, N., Schmidt, E., MacDonald, G., Holt, R., & Demuth, K. (2021). Five-year-olds produce prosodic cues to distinguish compounds from lists in Australian English. Journal of Child Language, 48(1), 110-128. doi: 10.1017/S0305000920000227 

Holiday Language Science Project

Titia Benders and Loes Koring are organising a Holiday Language Science Project for 4-5-year-old children to take part in research studies over the upcoming school holidays.

New staff

Macquarie University Hearing welcome Dr Kiri Mealings and Dr Ronny Ibrahim to the ECHO lab.  

New staff in Macquarie University

From left to right: Dr Ronny Ibrahim, A/Prof Jorg Buchholz (lab director), Dr Kelly Miles, Dr Kiri Mealings and Dr Alan Kan, with Gustav (front and centre) 

Thesis completion

  • Aleisha Davis (2021): “Improving communication outcomes for children with hearing loss in their early years: Tracking progress and guiding intervention”. PhD thesis (Linguistics) – Macquarie University, supervised by Elisabeth Harrison, Robert Cowan and Scott Barnes.

Departmental seminars

The weekly departmental seminar series takes place on Friday afternoons @3pm (Sydney time) in Tutorial Room 133, 9 Wally’s Walk. This is a hybrid format. Most presentations are delivered in person (Tutorial Room 133, 9 Wally’s Walk), as well as via zoom. 

The program is here and the zoom link for all presentations is here:

https://macquarie.zoom.us/j/86099150226?pwd=Z3hCUVpOUjZTWEV5T1ZIMGFmM2pFUT09

    Password: 326974

Joe Blythe

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News from the ANU

Publications

Arka, I W. 2021. ”Number in Marori, a Papuan language of Indonesia.” In Patricia Cabredo Hofherr and Jenny Doetjes (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Grammatical Number. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Arka, I W. 2021. ”Pivot selection and puzzling relativisation in Indonesian.” In Arka, I W., A. Asudeh and T. H King (eds), Modular design of grammar: Linguistics on the edge. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Arka, I W., A. Asudeh and T. H King (eds). 2021. Modular design of grammar: Linguistics on the edge. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/modular-design-of-grammar-9780192844842?q=asudeh&lang=en&cc=us 

Arka, I W. and M. Dalrymple. 2021. Number in Balinese. In Patricia Cabredo Hofherr and Jenny Doetjes (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Grammatical Number. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Baird, Louise, Nicholas Evans & Simon Greenhill. 2021. Blowing in the wind: using North Wind and Sun texts to sample phoneme inventories. Journal of the International Phonetic Association, pp. 1-42. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1017/S002510032000033X 

Barth, Danielle and Stefan Schnell. 2021. Understanding Corpus Linguistics. Routledge

This textbook introduces the fundamental concepts and methods of Corpus Linguistics for students coming to this topic for the first time, putting specific emphasis on the enormous linguistic diversity represented by approximately 7000 human languages and broadening the scope of current concerns in general corpus linguistics.

Providing a basic toolkit to help the reader investigate language in different usage contexts, this book:

  • Shows the relevance of corpora to a range of linguistic areas from phonology to sociolinguistics and discourse
  • Covers recent developments in the application of corpus linguistics to the study of understudied languages and linguistic typology 
  • Features exercises, short problems and questions 
  • Includes examples from real studies in over 15 languages plus multilingual corpora

Providing the necessary corpus linguistics skills to critically evaluate and replicate studies, this book is essential reading for anyone studying corpus linguistics.

Bundgaard-Nielsen, Rikke, & Carmel O'Shannessy. 2021.When more is more: The mixed language Light Warlpiri amalgamates source language phonologies to form a near-maximal inventory. Journal of Phonetics85, 101037. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wocn.2021.101037 

Bundgaard-Nielsen, Rikke and Carmel O'Shannessy. 2021. Voice onset time and constriction duration in Warlpiri stops (Australia). Phonetica.   https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/phon-2021-2001/html 

Carroll, Matthew J. (2021). Phonetics and phonology of Ngkolmpu. In Kate L. Lindsey & Dineke Schokkin (Eds.) Language Documentation & Conservation Special Publication No. 24: Phonetic fieldwork in Southern New Guinea.

Evans, Nicholas. 2021a. Idiomas vitales en México y Australia. Ichan Tecolotl 32.345. https://ichan.ciesas.edu.mx/idiomas-vitales-en-mexico-y-australia/ 

Evans, Nicholas. 2021b. The Phonetics of Southern New Guinea Languages. Language Documentation & Conservation Special Publication No. 24 (2021) Phonetic fieldwork in Southern New Guinea (ed. by Kate L. Lindsey & Dineke Schokkin), pp. 5–2 http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/ldc/ http://hdl.handle.net/24991 

Evans, Nicholas. 2021c. Social cognition in Dalabon. In Danielle Barth & Nicholas Evans (eds.). Language Documentation & Conservation Special Publication No. 12Social Cognition Parallax Interview Corpus (SCOPIC, pp. 22-84 http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/ldc/sp12 http://hdl.handle.net/10125/2474  

Olsson, Bruno. 2021. A Grammar of Coastal Marind (Mouton Grammar Library 87). Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.

O’Shannessy, Carmel; Brown, Connor. 2021. "Reflexive and Reciprocal Encoding in the Australian Mixed Language, Light Warlpiri" Languages 6, no. 2: 105. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages6020105 

O'Shannessy, Carmel. 2021.  Code-switching as a way of speaking - from language shift to language maintenance. In Babel, Anna and Mark Sicoli (Eds.) Contact, structure, and change: A festschrift in honor of Sarah G. Thomason. Ann Arbor: Michigan Publishing. pp36-42. https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.11616118 

O’Shannessy, Carmel. 2021. Mixed Languages. In Matras, Yaron and Evangelia Adamou(Eds.) Routledge Handbook of Language Contact. London / New York: Routledge. 325-348 

Passmore, Sam, Wolfgang Barth, Kyla Quinn, Simon Greenhill, Nicholas Evans & Fiona Jordan. 2021. Kin against kin: internal co-selection and the coherence of kinship typologies. Biological Theory. Thematic Issue ‘Evolution of kinship systems’.https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-021-00379-6 

Schokkin, Dineke, Volker Gast, Nicholas Evans & Christian Döhler. 2021. Phonetics and Phonology of Idi.  Language Documentation & Conservation Special Publication No. 24 (2021) Phonetic fieldwork in Southern New Guinea ed. by Kate L. Lindsey & Dineke Schokkin, pp. 76–107. http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/ldc/ http://hdl.handle.net/24995

Book launch

The book Meaning, Life and Culture: In Conversation with Anna Wierzbicka edited by Helen Bromhead and Zhengdao Ye was launched in May by James Fox, Elizabeth Minchin, Nicholas Evans and Jane Simpson. More than fifty people attended this in-person launch, including contributors Avery Andrews, Harold Koch, Cliff Goddard, Deborah Hill, David Nash, and Andy Pawley. The volume is dedicated to Anna Wierzbicka who has been an integral part of ANU linguistics since 1973. James Fox told of gaining Roman Jakobson’s approval to join ANU because of Anna’s presence there. Elizabeth Minchin traced Anna’s eventful life story. Nicholas Evans described the volume as a large family’s lively conversation around the dinner table. Jane Simpson highlighted Anna’s role in mentoring and encouraging women in linguistics. It was an occasion of great talks, warm words and delicious cake. The book is available through ANU Press either as online open access (i.e. for free!) or as hard copy on order.

Seminars, workshops and conferences

  • Carroll, Matthew J. The double verb construction in Yei. 13th Austronesian & Papuan Languages & Linguistics Conference, Edinburgh. 10th-12th June 2021. 
  • Carroll, Matthew J. Explaining redundancy in linguistic morphology: evidence from Yam and Kartvelian. Cultural Evolution Society Conference 2021, Sapporo. 9th-11th June 2021.
  • Melanesian Languages Gathering. ANU linguists from across campus who work on languages spoken in Melanesia were fortunate enough to get away for an informal gathering in Wee Jasper in late April (organised by Matt Carroll). We got to hear about languages from across the region, detailed new methods of corpus building, the state of archiving in the region and much more. We were fortunate enough to have plenty of time for campfire chats, walks through what is "one of the most diverse geological landscapes in Australia," and sharing meals together. It was a true privilege to be able to gather in person and away from screens for a weekend.
  • The Visual Voice Workshop project, funded by a CoEDL Transdisciplinary and Innovation Grant, led by Kathrin Kaiser (University of Queensland), Haoyi Li (Australian National University) and Gulwanyang (Research Assistant, University of Queensland), had its first online session held over two days in May (22-23rd). Participants from India, North America and Australia attended to discuss issues and solutions in the visual design of language resources in revitalisation contexts.


The workshop has also partnered with Muurrbay Aboriginal Language and Culture Co-operative to deliver an in-person workshop on 26th June. 

Job

The ANU is seeking to appoint a scholar (Level B, 5 years fixed term) to make a substantial contribution to its Indonesian language program, who has a track record of field research and high-quality publications on Indonesia. Applications close on 15 Jul 2021 11:55:00 PM AUS Eastern Standard Time. For further information, see https://jobs.anu.edu.au/cw/en/job/540692?lApplicationSubSourceID&fbclid=IwAR3VS-t5W1TovXFFyQB7IdmRpFn2osbxe_Th6lTy1tgJkH2wCd-jj_kgb5A.

Wayan Arka

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News from the University of Queensland

As we farewelled Associate Professor Erich Round (temporarily) from our shores as he takes up a prestigious British Academy fellowship, we welcomed Dr Samantha Disbray into the Linguistics Program as the new Lecturer in Endangered Languages and we look forward to the return of corpus linguist Dr. Martin Schweinburger as Lecturer in Applied Linguistics from July.

Congratulations to Valeria Sinkeviciute, Melody Chang and Samantha Disbray on their success in attracting Strategic Research funds from the School of Languages and Cultures for their project, “Conversational humour in multilingual Australia: A closer look at Tennant Creek’s Indigenous and Brisbane’s Spanish speech communities.” Always important to keep our senses of humour...

Recent Publications

Dynel, Marta and Valeria Sinkeviciute. (2021). Conversational humour. In Michael Haugh, Dániel Z. Kádár and Marina Terkourafi (eds.), Cambridge Handbook of Sociopragmatics. Cambridge University Press, pp. 408-429.

Ekberg, K., Ekberg, S., Weinglass, L., & Danby, S. (2021). Pandemic morality-in-action: Accounting for social action during the COVID-19 pandemic. Discourse & Societyhttps://doi.org/10.1177/09579265211023232

Feist, Timothy, Matthew Baerman, Greville G. Corbett, and Erich R. Round. 2021. “Surrey Lexical Splits Database.” https://lexicalsplitsdb.surrey.ac.uk/.

Harvey, Alistair. 2021. Kalaw Kawaw Ya (Saibai Island, Western Torres Strait Islands, Australia) – Language Snapshot. Language Documentation and Description 20, 75-85.  http://www.elpublishing.org/docs/1/20/ldd20_06.pdf

Haugh, Michael, Dániel Z. Kádár and Marina Terkourafi (eds.) (2021) Cambridge Handbook of Sociopragmatics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cambridge-handbook-of-sociopragmatics/5366B838C429424CBCB5E34433046B80

Mushin, I. & Pekarek Doehler, S (2021). Linguistic structures in social interaction: Moving temporality to the forefront of a science of language. Interactional Linguistics 1:1, 2-35.

Obana, Yasuko and Michael Haugh (2021). (Non-)propositional irony in Japanese.(Im)politeness behind honorifics. Lingua 103119. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2021.103119

Qiu, Jia, Xinren Chen and Michael Haugh (2021). Jocular flattery in Chinese multi-party instant messaging interactions. Journal of Pragmatics 178: 225-241. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2021.03.020

Schweinberger, Martin, Michael Haugh and Sam Hames (2021). Analysing discourse around COVID-19 in the Australian Twittersphere: A real-time corpus-based analysis. Big Data & Society 8(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517211021437

Sinkeviciute, Valeria and Andrea Rodriguez. (2021). “So… introductions”: Conversational openings in getting acquainted interactions. Journal of Pragmatics 179: 44-53. 

Theses

Congratulations to our most recent HDR and MA graduates!

PhD

Majdah Aseeri: “Pragmatic Strategies in Saudi Arabian University Students’ Communication with Lecturers: A Comparison of Language and Gender”

Mitch Browne: A Grammatical description of Warlmanpa: A Ngumpin-Yapa language spoken around Tennant Creek (Northern Territory).

Jayden Macklin-Cordes: “Phonotactics in historical linguistics: Quantitative interrogation of a novel data source”

MA in Applied Linguistics

Andrea Rodriguez: “Ay no, I do feel exhausted”: Interactional co-construction and interpersonal management of complaints in Spanish phone conversations between friends and relatives

Maria Nagao: English teachers of young learners in Japan: A discourse analytical study on identity construction

Shupei Ni: Relational work in video game live streaming interactions: Case studies of jocular abuse and joint fantasizing

Ilana Mushin

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News from Western Sydney University

Talks

Hannah Sarvasy. 2021. Nungon Switch-Reference: Processing and Acquisition. 13th APLL conference (on 12 June), University of Edinburgh:

Caudal, Patrick & Robert Mailhammer. 2021 Tensed periphrastic vs. synthetic modal inflections in Iwaidja. A novel insight into grammaticalization cycles for modality in Northern Australia? Evidentiality and Modality: At the crossroads of grammar and lexicon, University of Montpellier, 10-11 June

Hackert, Stephanie, Robert Mailhammer & Elena Smirnova. 2021. Perfect constructions in varieties of English and German: Typologies and diachronic implications. Annual meeting of the German Linguistic Society 2021, University of Freiburg

Publications

Hardini I, Di Biase B, Kawaguchi S, Reid C. (in press, 2021). Developmentally moderated focus on form in an Indonesian kindergarten EFL program, in Processability Theory and Language Acquisition in the Asia-Pacific Region, Amsterdam: John Benjamins publishing.

Kawaguchi, S., & Iwasaki, J. (2021). Acquiring content questions in Japanese : the case of a sequential English-Japanese bilingual child. The International Journal of Early Childhood Learning, 28(1), p 39-60.Liu, Y. Qi, R. & Di Biase, B. (2021). Cross-linguistic influence of L2 on L1 in late Chinese-English bilinguals -The case of subject realisation. Journal of Second Language Studies, vol.3 (2)  p. 290 – 315.

Kik, Alfred , Martin Adamec, Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald, Jarmila Bajzekova, Nigel Baro, Claire Bowern, Robert K. Colwell, Pavel Drozd, Pavel Duda, Sentiko Ibalim, Leonardo R. Jorge, Jane Mogina, Ben Ruli, Katerina Sam, Hannah Sarvasy, Simon Saulei, George D. Weiblen, Jan Zrzavy, Vojtech Novotny. 2021. Language and ethnobiological skills decline precipitously in Papua New Guinea, the world’s most linguistically diverse nation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Jun 2021, 118 (22) e2100096118; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2100096118

Mailhammer, Robert. 2021. English on Croker Island: the synchronic and diachronic dynamics of contact and variation. Topics in English Linguistics 109. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter Mouton

Salleh, R. T. A. M., Di Biase, B. & Kawaguchi, S. (2021). Lexical and morphological development: A case study of Malay English bilingual first language acquisition. Psychology of Language and Communication, 25(1), 29-61.

Sarvasy Hannah. in press. Quantifying clause chains in Nungon texts. Studies in Language.

Rob Mailhammer

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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 three times per year, in March, July and October. 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 March, July or October. 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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