17/04/2024

ALS Newsletter #1 2024

News from ALS

ALS Funding Schemes

The Australian Linguistic Society calls for applications to the following funding schemes, with a deadline of May 6th. Scheme guidelines and applications forms are now available from the ALS website. Please contact Brett Baker for further info: bjbaker@unimelb.edu.au

  • The ALS Research Grants scheme offers grants of up to $5,000 for research in any area of linguistics, and funds approximately five projects per year.
  • The Jalwang Scholarship supports linguists to give back to the community by converting some of their research into materials of benefit to the language community.
  • The Gerhardt Laves Scholarship contributes to fieldwork expenses for postgraduate student researchers in Indigenous languages of Australia or its immediate region.
  • The Susan Kaldor Scholarship supports ALS student members to attend an international summer school or institute.
  • The Michael Clyne Prize (awarded jointly with the Applied Linguistics Association of Australia) is awarded for the most outstanding postgraduate research thesis in immigrant bilingualism and language contact.
  • The Barb Kelly Prize is awarded for the most outstanding postgraduate research thesis in any area of linguistics.

ALS Accreditation

Did you know that the Australian Linguistic Society offers accreditation for qualified linguists? The qualification of Accredited Linguist indicates that the holder has completed a course of study equivalent to a pass degree with a major in Linguistics through an ALS approved provider, OR that the holder has been able to demonstrate a sound knowledge of Linguistics at an advanced level, and has applied that knowledge competently and ethically through practice for more than three years.

This qualification may be useful in applying for a range of jobs, further study, or in other professional contexts. Although this is a relatively recent initiative, accreditation is already beginning to appear on the list of selection criteria for some linguist positions. We encourage you to consider applying for accreditation, and/or sharing this scheme with newly graduated or soon-to-graduate students.

More information about eligibility and the application process can be found on our website: https://als.asn.au/Accreditation. Currently, the requirements for the education pathway are listed; the professional pathway is expected to become available later this year.

Please contact Sasha Wilmoth, ALS Vice President (Professional Development), at sasha.wilmoth@unimelb.edu.au if you have any questions regarding this scheme, or if you are interested in applying for accreditation via the professional pathway.

ALS Social Media

ALS is now on Bluesky. We are @auslingsoc.bsky.social

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News from the University of New England (UNE)

Armidale is enjoying some beautiful weather, and UNE Linguistics is in the groove!

Recent Publications

Dixon, Sally, (2023) Alyawarr English: A new contact language of Central Australia. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages. https://doi.org/10.1075/jpcl.00128.dix

Iyengar, Arvind (2023). More matters of typology: Alphasyllabaries, abugidas and related vowelled segmentaries. Written Language & Literacy, 26(1), 30–56.

Ndhlovu, Finex 2023. Troubling Sociolinguistics Practice and the Coloniality of Universalism. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 1 – 5.

Ndhlovu, Finex & Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Sabelo, J (eds.). 2024. Language and Decolonisation: An Interdisciplinary Approach. Routledge. Preorder on book's webpage at https://www.routledge.com/Language-and-Decolonisation-An-Interdisciplinary-Approach/Ndhlovu-Ndlovu-Gatsheni/p/book/9781032322544#

Maryns, Katrijn, Laura Smith-Khan, & Marie Jacobs. (2023). Multilingualism in Asylum and Migration Procedures. In McKinney, Carolyn, Pinky Makoe, & Virginia Zavala (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Multilingualism, 2nd edition. Routledge.

Completing HDR students

After years of diligently chipping away (when time allowed), Catherine Dennett successfully completed her Masters thesis, Selected grammatical topics in Kairak, East New Britain, PNG. Kairak was described by one reviewer as a “devilishly difficult” language. Well done Cath! (Supervisor: Cindy Schneider)

Also, Larissa Shihoff completed her Masters thesis with top marks: Language diversity in the Australian Education System- A Critical Review. Congratulations, Larissa! (Supervisors: Mandy Scott (ANU) & Finex Ndhlovu)

Media Appearances/Presentations

Arvind Iyengar was interviewed on ABC Radio on the subject of writing systems, during which he answered questions like: What’s the ‘youngest’ alphabet around? Does the surface you write on have any impact on the visual features of an alphabet’s letters? How did UNE’s new unit, LING381/581 Writing Systems of the World, come to be? Link to audio: ABC Radio Hobart Evenings, 10 Jan 2024 (audio starts at interview, which runs from 1:05 – 1:22).

Piers Kelly gave a fascinating presentation to a packed audience at UNE’s HASS Research Seminar Series on 4th April 2024: Signs and wonders: Miraculous revelation and recuperation as recurring motifs in global origin stories about writing.

On 15th June 2023, Cindy Schneider gave a talk at the UNE Asia-Pacific Network Research Showcase: “Language is played as a bit of a card here”: How the Vanuatu Supreme Court Manges its Colonial Legacy.

Welcomes

Laura Smith-Khan has joined UNE this year as a Senior Lecturer in the School of Law. From July to December 2023, she visited the Department of Translation, Interpreting and Communication at Ghent University in Belgium. While there, she presented a keynote at the InDialog4 conference, and travelled to visit colleagues and give presentations at the University of Antwerp, Maastricht University’s Centre for Human Rights, Birmingham University, and Stockholm University. In July, she also presented in plenary (by video) at IAFLL’s 16th Biennial Conference, held at the University of Santo Tomas in Manila, the Philippines. Welcome, Laura!

Welcome also to two new PhD students:

Noémie Severin – ‘Testing mutual intelligibility between Namakura, Nakanamanga, Lelepa, Eton, and South Efate’. (Supervisors: Cindy Schneider & Charlotte Gooskens (Groningen))

Andi Syurganda – ‘Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education in Indonesia’. (Supervisors: Cindy Schneider & Helen Harper (UNE Education))

Farewells

On 2 August 2023 the indefatigable UNE Adjunct, Margaret Sharpe, moved from Armidale to Nerang, Queensland. Margaret has been with UNE since 1978 as a linguist and expert in Aboriginal languages and culture. Whilst in her 80s, she also completed a Masters in Astro Physics. Margaret is a UNE legend and we look forward to seeing her on her regular visits back to Armidale. In the meantime, she continues to work on a variety of projects.  

Wish You Were Here!

PhD student Chris Odhiambo

PhD student Chris Odhiambo is doing ethnographic fieldwork in Kenya. He is researching decolonisation strategies to interrogate the pivotal role of language in building an inclusive political governance in Kenya. (Supervisors: Finex Ndhlovu & Christina Kenny (UNE Sociology)).

Cindy Schneider

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News from Charles Darwin University (CDU)

Courses

CDU continues to offer a Languages and Linguistics major with a focus on Australian First Nations language contexts, in the Diploma of Arts and Bachelor of Arts. All units are offered online for external students (cross-institutional enrolments possible), and First Nations students have the option to enrol in short 6-week semesters that include a one-week face-to-face workshop held at the Darwin Casuarina Campus. In addition, from July eight new credit-bearing microcredential units will be offered, open to people from outside of CDU. The units have been developed primarily to meet the needs and interests of those working in community language programs, NGOs, schools and education providers, particularly First Nations language speakers, learners and advocates. For any queries about these offerings, please get in touch with James Bednall (james.bednall@cdu.edu.au).

CDU also offers postgraduate opportunities to study Applied Linguistics through a TESOL major in the Master of Education, Graduate Diploma of Specialist Education and Graduate Certificate of Specialist Education. All units are offered both online and face-to-face. For information about these offerings, please get in touch with Andrew Pollard (andrew.pollard@cdu.edu.au) or Raelke Grimmer (raelke.grimmer@cdu.edu.au).

Check out the new CDU Linguistics webpage for news and updates on CDU Linguistics courses, teaching and research.

Current projects

Cris Edmonds-Wathen is CI on the CDU project ‘Mathematics in Indigenous languages’, working with James Bednall, along with University of Melbourne collaborators Sasha Wilmoth and Kate Charlwood. The project is working with three language communities/schools to develop early primary mathematics teaching sequences in their languages: Pitjantjatjara (Areyonga School), Anindilyakwa (Groote Eylandt Bickerton Island Primary College Aboriginal Corporation (GEBIPCAC)) and Tiwi (Murrupurtiyanuwu Catholic Primary School). This year:

  • Cris and Sasha have continued working with Areyonga School and co-presented with the school to a combined Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara/Yankunytjatjara school workshop.
  • Cris and James made a trip to Groote Eylandt in February and facilitated the start of teaching maths in Anindilyakwa at Umbakumba and Milyakburra Schools.
  • Teaching maths in Tiwi also commenced at Murrupurtiyanuwu Catholic Primary School in February, with Cris making three visits so far this year and Kate making one trip.

Awni Etaywe is currently co-editing a special issue (6:1) of Language, Context and Text on 'social semiotics of peace, compassion and empathy'. This edition explores how language and semiotics realise these ideals across various contexts, informing media discourse design and fostering social change. Grounded in systemic functional linguistics, it showcases tools for understanding language's role in discourse for positive impact.

HDR news

Congratulations to Brandon Wiltshire, who was awarded his PhD in March 2024 for his thesis ‘“You gotta feel good first before you can start learning language”: Understanding how and why Indigenous language revitalisation programs work according to local perspectives’.

Welcome to Mamoun Bani Amer, who started his PhD at CDU Casuarina Campus in March 2024. His PhD project looks into the language of social (dis)affiliation within the Voice Referendum campaigns, and is supervised by Nicola Rolls and Awni Etaywe.

Grants

Congratulations to Nicola Bidwell, Ian Gumbula and Steven Bird, on the award of their ARC Discovery Project ‘First Nations AI: Country, Climate, Communication’ (2024-27), hosted at CDU. The project is a collaboration with Bureau of Meteorology, NT Emergency Services, Aboriginal Interpreter Service.

Publications

Aquino, Angelina, Ian Mongunu Gumbula, Nicola Bidwell, and Steven Bird. 2024. What's the weather story? Both-ways learning in co-designed weather and climate communication workshops in northern Australia. To appear in Participatory Design Conference 2024, 12-16 August 2024, Sibu, Malaysia.

Bednall, James. 2024. Onomatopoeia in Anindilyakwa. In L. Körtvélyessy, & P. Štekauer (Eds.), Onomatopoeia in the World’s Languages: A Comparative Handbook (pp. 251-263).  Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, p. 251-263. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111053226-021

Bird, Steven and Dean Yibarbuk. 2024. Centering the speech community.  Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Malta, March. https://aclanthology.org/2024.eacl-long.50/ (outstanding paper award).

Hayashi, Yasunori. 2023. A Yolngu ontology of language announces itself in academia. Learning Communities: International Journal of Learning in Social contexts, 28, 18-28. https://doi.org/10.18793/lcj2023.28.03

Waṉambi, Gawura, Joy Bulkanhawuy, Brenda Muthamuluwuy & Yasunori Hayashi. 2023. Yolŋu Diplomacy. Australian Journal of International Affairs, 77(6), 600-605. https://doi.org/10.1080/10357718.2023.2268028

Recent Presentations

  • Cameron, Annie. 2023. Language documentation as Aboriginal social history – the unique circumstances of Pilbara language work. Australian Linguistic Society Conference. 29 November – 1 December 2023, University of Sydney.
  • Etaywe, Awni. 2023. An evaluative textbite approach to examining identity attacks in terrorist threatening communications: The semantics of attitude as evidence. ASFLA Annual Conference, Wollongong, NSW, 22-24 November 2023.
  • Muthamuluwuy, Brenda, Joy Bulkanhawuy, Yasunori Hayashi & Helen Verran. 2023. Caring for Yolngu Language. Paper presented at Spinning a Better Yarn: decolonising linguistics study group. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3nwP6acCRg

Outreach

Awni Etaywe has recently contributed to the public’s awareness of the linguistics of incitement to genocide and violent extremist discourse through several media interviews, including:

  • A discussion on understanding how hate speech translates into acts of terror, particularly in relation to the 2019 Christchurch attacks in New Zealand and its associated manifesto, broadcasted on Radio New Zealand's Morning Report program on 31 August 2023: Morning Report - Radio New Zealand
  • Expert quotes featured (on 3 November 2023) in the substantive New Zealand Defence and Security (DEFSEC) magazine 'Line of Defence 29 (Spring 2023), p. 33’, in the International Security section’s ‘Breaking the code: Understanding the linguistics of geno-urbicide in Gaza’: Line of Defence - DEFSEC New Zealand
  • A detailed discussion and quotes on 'the linguistics of genocide' and the role of forensic linguists in assessing intent and incitement to genocide. This interview, held on 20 January 2024, was featured in City Hub Sydney: City Hub Sydney - The Linguistics of Genocide
  • A televised interview with Sky News (on 12 January 2024) addressing the dangers of language used in incitement to hatred and genocide, particularly focusing on Gaza: Sky News - Incitement to Hatred and Genocide (Go to 2:46.45).
  • A live radio interview (on 18 January 2024) with 'The Breakfast Show' on 3CR Radio, Melbourne, discussing the illegal discursive practices and linguistics of genocide in relation to the South African case against Israel at the ICJ: The Breakfast Show - 3CR Radio
  • An informative session on the ICJ's orders against Israel and how the order rebuts denial and is linguistically and legally binding, aired on 'The Breakfast Show' of 3CR Radio, Melbourne, on 12 February 2024: The Breakfast Show - 3CR Radio (0:31:00-0:58:00).

Top End Linguistic Circle (TELC)

Linguists and language practitioners visiting Darwin are welcome any time to present at the Top End Linguistic Circle, which meets semi-regularly throughout the year. Get in touch with the committee at topendlingcircle@gmail.com or sign up to the mailing list to stay updated.

James Bednall

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News from Monash University

Journal Articles

Burke, I & Kate Burridge 2023 From a bit of processed cheese to a bit of a car accident and a little bit of “oh really” — the journey of Australian English a bit (of).  Journal of Pragmatics, Vol. 209, pp. 15-30.

Curkpatrick, Samuel, Robert Burke, Alice Gaby, David Wilfred & Peter Knight. In press. Resounding relations: Habits of improvisation in Yolŋu song and contemporary Australian jazz. Performance Research. https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2023.2334632.

Willoughby, L., & Sell, C. (2024). Online videos for self-directed second language learning. Language Learning & Technology, 28, 1.

Book Chapters

Burridge, Kate 2023. Prescription and taboo — Australia’s sensitivity towards American influence  In Joan C. Beal, Morana Lukač and Robin Straaijer (eds) Routledge Handbook of Linguistic Prescriptivism. London: Routledge; pp. 246-263.

Musgrave, Simon & Kate Burridge 2023. Irish Influence on Australian English, in Oxford Handbook of Irish English edited by Raymond Hickey, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 544-562. 

Newman, J. 2023. Person-oriented Linguistic Research. In Thomas (Fuyin) Li (ed.), Handbook of Cognitive Semantics, Vol 2. pp. 351-375. Leiden: Brill. 

Vaughan, Jill and Ruth Singer. 2023. Organising diversity: naming groups and their languages in Indigenous Australia. In S. Ndlovu (Ed.) Personal Names and Naming from an Anthropological-Linguistic Perspective. De Gruyter Mouton, Anthropological Linguistics. Pp. 133-152.

Vaughan, Jill, Ruth Singer and Gillian Wigglesworth. 2023. Sociolinguistic research into Indigenous languages of Australia. In M. J. Ball, R. Mesthrie & C. Meluzzi (Eds), The Routledge Handbook of Sociolinguistics around the World (2nd ed.). Routledge. Pp. 312-322

Vaughan, Jill. 2023. Burarra. In A. Mettouchi (Ed), Linguistic Heritage through Time and Space. Paris: ILARA. Pp. 158.

Xu, Zhichang. 2023. Exploring creativity and competence in online discussion forums using Virtual English as a lingua franca. In I. Pineda & R. Bosso (Eds), Virtual English as a Lingua Franca. New York and London: Routledge. Pp. 109-128 

Xu, Zhichang. 2024 (in press). Chinese Englishes. In K. Bolton (Ed), The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of World Englishes. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 

Textbooks (secondary school)

Burridge, Kate, Debbie De Laps, Izzy Burke 2023. Love the Lingo: VCE English Language (substantially revised new edition) (VCE Units 1 & 2 English Language). Spark: Melbourne.

Burridge, Kate and Debbie De Lapps, Izzy Burke 2023. Living Lingo (substantially revised new edition) (VCE Units 3 & 4). Spark: Melbourne.

PhD Completions

  • Anthony P Williams The Enigma Of Le In Mandarin Chinese: An Event Quantifier Account Of Le And Non-Le With Action Predicates Supervisors: Simon Musgrave, Kate Burridge, Scott Grant
  • Thomas Poulton The Linguistic Representation Of Olfactory Experiences Supervisors: Alice Gaby, Kate Burridge
  • Hugh Nettelbeck Decision Making In The Subtitling Process:  Facilitating Communication Between Stakeholders, makes a distinct and significant contribution to knowledge Supervisors: Shani Tobias, Rebecca Margolis, Tessa Dwyer
  • Suzanne Grasso Multilingual Development Advice At The Maternal And Child Health Service. Supervisors Louisa Willoughby, Anna Margetts
  • XIANMING Fang Refusals in English as a Lingua Franca: An Investigation of Chinese and Indonesian Speakers of English. Supervisors Lucien Brown and Howie Manns  

New Grants

  • 2024-2027: ARC DP240102369 Where Gesture Meets Grammar: Crosslinguistic Multimodal Communication (Anna Margetts, Lucien Brown, Jill Vaughan). $523,520. 
  • 2024-25: Endangered Languages Documentation Program Major Documentation Project Showing stories: ancestral narratives in the artistic practice of north-central Arnhem Land (Jill Vaughan). $166,761.
  • 2023-24 Generation of Auslan Fingerspelling (Kalin Stefanov and Louisa Willoughby) Telematics Trust $50,000
  • 2023-24 Signbank Expansion (Louisa Willoughby) Victorian Deaf Education Institute 
  • 2024-2028 Transforming Auslan Education in Australia ARC Mid Career Industry Fellowship (Louisa Willoughby) $937,000
  • 2024-25 Safe words Monash Health - Dandenong Hospital (Louisa Willoughby)
  • 2024-2029 ARC Mid-Career Industry Fellowship, IM230100544 Unlocking the archive: reuniting Indigenous languages and their communities (Alice Gaby) $889,451
  • 2024-2025 Contract research project. Pure ID 518068702 Exploring the texts, contexts and paratexts of Zhu Dake’s works《燃烧的迷津》(The Burning Maze) and 《大桶》(Datong/Great Pail) (Marc Xu, Hailan Paulsen) $50,000 (Funder: Xin Jin Shan Library, Ballarat)
  • 2023-2026 Central Reserve Allocation Committee (CRAC) project of the Education University of Hong Kong: Asian literature in English: Creativity, translanguaging, and language education (Principal Project Supervisors: Angel Ma, Kelly Tse, John Erni; Internal Co-supervisors: Lee Ju Seong, Banerjee Bidisha, Wang Lixun, Zou Di Daisy, Chang Tsung-chi Hawk, Liu Yiqi, Mak Wing Wah, Chen Hsueh Chu; External Co-supervisors: Marc Xu, Ding Rongrong, Peter Crosthwaite) HKD$2,608,000  

Exciting Postdoc News

Tom Poulton has been successful in getting a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship and is off to Paris this year.

Tom Ennever is starting a postdoc with the Surrey Morphology Group on "Kukatja capacity building and linguistic fieldwork in Balgo, Australia" (supervised by Prof Erich Round).

Kate Burridge

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News from Macquarie University

Phonetics Lab Updates

Journal Articles & Book Chapters

  • Cox, F. & Docherty, G. (2024) Sociophonetics: Vowels, in. Strelluf, Christopher. (ed.) Routledge Handbook of Sociophonetics, Routledge, Oxon, pp 114-142. DOI: 10.4324/9781003034636-7
  • Cox, F., Penney, J. & Palethorpe, S. (2023). Fifty years of change to prevocalic definite article allomorphy in Australian English. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 53 (3), 804-834.
  • Cox, F., Penney, J. & Palethorpe, S. (2024) Australian English monophthong change across 50 years: Static versus dynamic measures, Languages, 9 https://doi.org/10.3390/languages9030099
  • Harvey, M., San, N., Proctor, M., Panther, F., & Turpin, M. (2023). The Kaytetye segmental inventory. Australian Journal of Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 07268602.2023.2218270
  • Mealings, K., Miles, K.M., Parrila, R., Holt, R., Cox, F., Sharma, M., Demuth, K., Leigh, G., McMahon, C., Mcarthur, G. & Buchholz, J. M. (2023). An interdisciplinary approach to enhance children's listening, learning, and wellbeing in the classroom: The Listen to Learn for Life (L 3) Assessment Framework, Frontiers in Education. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2023.1185167.
  • Penney, J., Cox, F. & Gibson, A. (2024) Hiatus resolution and linguistic diversity in Australian English, Phonetica https://doi.org/10.1515/phon-2023-0029.
  • Penney, J., & Szakay, A. (2024). Ladz in the Hood: Features of Pasifika English in Drill Rappers from Western Sydney. Languages, 9(3), 79.
  • Ratko, L., Proctor M & Cox F. (2023) Gestural characterisation of vowel length contrasts in Australian English, Journal of Phonetics, 98, 1-21. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wocn.2023.101237 0095-4470
  • Shea, T., Gibson, A., Szakay, A. & Cox F. (2023) Australian English Speakers' Attitudes to Fricated Coda /t/. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 34:1, 87-119, DOI: 10.1080/07268602.2023.2223506.
  • White, H., Penney, J., Gibson, A., Szakay, A. & Cox F. (2024) Influence of speaker sex and pitch on perception of creaky voice, Journal of Phonetics, 102, 1-15.

Published Conference Proceedings

  • Gibson, A., Penney, J. & Cox, F. (2023) Acquiring allophony:  GOOSE and SCHOOL vowels in the speech of Australian children, Proceedings of the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences 2023, Prague.
  • Penney, J., Gibson, A., Cox, F. (2023) Variation in FACE and FLEECE trajectories in Australian English adolescents according to community language diversity, Proceedings of the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences 2023, Prague
  • Ratko, L., Penney, J. & Cox, F. (2023) Opening or closing? An electroglottographic analysis of voiceless coda consonants in Australian English, Proceedings of INTERSPEECH 2023, Dublin.
  • Szalay, T., Benders, T., Cox, F., & Proctor, M. (2023) Prelateral vowel change in Australian English POOL-PULL, Proceedings of the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences 2023, Prague, 2976-2980.
  • White, H., Penney, J., Gibson, A., Szakay, A. & Cox F. (2023) Convergence of creaky voice use in Australian English, Proceedings of the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences 2023, Prague, 1791-1795.
  • White, H., Penney, J., Gibson, A., Szakay, A. & Cox, F. (2023) Creak prevalence and prosodic context in Australian English, Proceedings of INTERSPEECH 2023, Dublin.

Conference Presentation Authorships

  • Clements, C., Penney, J., Szakay, A. & Cox, F. (2023, 29 November- 1 December). Variability of intervocalic lateral darkness in Australian English: new insights from diverse speech communities in Sydney. ALS Conference, Camperdown, NSW, Australia.
  • Cox, F. & Penney, J. (2023, 29 November- 1 December). Variability in intervocalic taps within words according to community diversity in Australian English. ALS Conference, Camperdown, NSW, Australia.
  • Cox, F., Ratko, L., Kim, J., Pennery, J. & Proctor, M. (2023, 29 November- 1 December). Investigating rhotic production by Australian English speakers using ultrasound imaging. ALS Conference, Camperdown, NSW, Australia.
  • Harvey, M., Proctor, M. & Sherwood, S. (2023, 29 November- 1 December). Manner oppositions in Larrakia stops. ALS Conference, Camperdown, NSW, Australia.
  • Jin, C., Gully, A., Proctor, M., Ballard, K., Foster, S., Piyadasa, T. & Yue, Y. (2023). Exploring the relationship between real-time midsagittal images of the vocal tract and volumetric data. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 154 (4S), A244-A244
  • Penney, J., Cox, F., & Palethorpe, S. (2023). Variation in pre-nasal raising of TRAP in Australian English. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 154 (S4), A334.
  • Proctor, M. (2023) VSpace: A browser-based vowel synthesiser The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 154 (S4), A203-A203
  • Proctor, M., Ballard, K., Jin, C., Gully, A., Foster, S., Piyadasa, T. & Yue, Y. (2023) Real-time imaging of vocal tract configuration in Australian English vowel production. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 154 (S4), A245-A245.
  • Ratko, L., Penney, J., & Cox, F. (2023). An electroglottographic study on the effect of following context on glottal constriction in Australian English coda/t/. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 154(S4), A244-A244.
  • Ratko, L., Penney, J., & Cox, F. (2023, 29 November- 1 December). An electroglottographic study of vowel-voiceless stop sequences in Australian English. ALS Conference, Camperdown, NSW, Australia.
  • Shea, T., Penney, J., Szakay, A. & Cox, F. (2023, 29 November- 1 December). The Effect of Sexual Orientation and Traditional Masculinity on F0 Measures of Australian English Speaking Men’s Voices. ALS Conference, Camperdown, NSW, Australia.
  • Szalay, T., Benders, T., Cox, F., Proctor, M. (2023). Prelateral vowel change in Australian English pool-pull trajectories, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 154 (S4), A205-A205.
  • White, H., Penney, J., Gibson, A., Szakay, A., & Cox, F. (2023). Creaky voice prevalence across Sydney. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 154(S4), A335.

PhD Completion

  • Dr Hannah White, PhD Linguistics (MQ) 2023

Awarded Vice Chancellor’s Commendation for Academic Excellence: Creaky Voice in Australian English (supervisors Cox, Szakay, Penney, Gibson)

PhD Commencement

  • Conor Clements, PhD Linguistics.

Rhythm, timing and their acoustic correlates in Australian English: insights from diverse speech communities in Sydney (supervisors Cox, Penney, Szakay)

Post Doctoral Research Fellow Appointments

Dr Louise Ratko, Dr Hannah White

Award

We also congratulate Professor Felicity Cox on her appointment as a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities

News from Macquarie Linguistics Conversation Analysis Lab

Formerly Conversation Analysis in Sydney, Macquarie Linguistics Conversation Analysis has a new website.

New HDR research projects

Jingyi Yang (MRes Candidate) Reference to co-present participants in Mandarin conversation.

Ashleigh Jones (PhD candidate) Simultaneous production as an interactional phenomenon in cross-modal bilingual conversation.

Recent Publications

Barnes, Scott & Francesco Possemato. 2024. Multimodal Analysis of Interaction. In The Handbook of Clinical Linguistics, Second Edition, 115–127. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119875949.ch9.

Hamdani, Fakry & Scott Barnes. 2023. Aphasia and explicit next speaker selection. Journal of Interactional Research in Communication Disorders 14(1). 45–78. https://doi.org/10.1558/jircd.20512.

Mushin, Ilana, Joe Blythe, Josua Dahmen, Caroline de Dear, Rod Gardner, Francesco Possemato & Lesley Stirling. 2023. Towards an interactional grammar of interjections: Expressing compassion in four Australian languages. Australian Journal of Linguistics 43(2). 158–189. https://doi.org/10.1080/07268602.2023.2244442.

Ong, Ben, Scott Barnes & Niels Buus. 2024. A conversation analysis of therapist repeats in open dialogue network meetings. Family Process 63(1). 113–129. https://doi.org/10.1111/famp.12852.

Invited talks

Blythe, Joe. 2024. Person reference preferences driving grammatical and lexical change. Grammar across time, Stockholm.

Conference presentations

de Dear, Caroline. 2023. Gendered questions and the utility of agreement avoidance in Gija. Presented at the ALS2023, University of Sydney.

Ilana Mushin, Lesley Stirling, Joe Blythe. Using conversation analysis to understand linguistic structures ‘in the wild’. Masterclass delivered at  ALS2023, University of Sydney. 29th Nov 2023.

News from the Language on the Move team

Language on the Move has partnered with the New Books Network to launch the Language on the Move Podcast. The podcast is hosting conversations about linguistic diversity in social life with key thinkers in our field. Our aim is to have in-depth and fun conversations about language learning, intercultural communication, multilingualism, applied sociolinguistics, and much more. We explore ideas, debates, problems, and innovations, in a format this is easily accessible and makes a great teaching resource.

Hannah Torsh has received the Chitra Fernando Fellowship for her project Perceptions on education and post-school futures for children from Language Other Than English (LOTE) communities.

Publications

Piller, I., Torsh, H., Bodis A. and A. S. Bruzon. (2024). The monolingual habitus of the multilingual school as a barrier to educational equity. Routledge Handbook on Promoting Equity in Education through Inclusive Systems and Societies. P. Downes, G. Li, L. V. Praag and S. Lamb, Routledge.

News from the Child Language Lab

Visiting Positions

  • Sept-Oct 2023  Santa Fe Institute (SFI), Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. (Katherine Demuth)
  • June-Aug 2023 University of Edinburgh, School of Informatics (Katherine Demuth)

Peer reviewed invited book chapters

  • Demuth, K. (2024/in press). Exploring the acquisition of phonology: Methodological advances.  In Jardine, A. & de Lacy, P. (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Phonology, Cambridge University Press.
  • Demuth, K., Matlosa, L., & Qala, T. (2024/in press).  Sesotho speech acquisition. McLeod, S. (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Speech Development in Languages of the World, Oxford University Press.
  • Davies, B. & Demuth, K. (2023). The role of phonology in morphological acquisition.  In Crepaldi, D. (Ed.), Linguistic Morphology in the Mind and Brain. Current Issues in the Psychology of Language, (pp. 183-197): Routledge.
  • Xu Rattanasone, N., Davies, B., & Demuth, K. (2024). Early bilingual acquisition: the effects of home language typology on learning English inflectional morphology. In W. Han, & C. Brebner (Eds.), Typical and atypical language development in cultural and linguistic diversity (pp. 9-22). Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003251194-2
  • Benders, T., Xu Rattanasone, N., Thornton, R., Mulders, I., & Koring, L. (2024). Experimental methods to study child language. In S. Zufferey, & P. Gygax (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of experimental linguistics (pp. 375-389). (Routledge Handbooks in Linguistics). Taylor and Francis. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003392972-28

Journal articles

Conference Proceedings

  • Xu, F., Tang, P., Demuth, K., and Xu Rattanasone, N. (Accepted 9th March, 2024). Mandarin-speaking 6-year-olds can use preboundary pitch range expansion to disambiguate compounds from lists. Speech Prosody 2024, 2-5 July 2024, Leiden, The Netherlands.
  • Ryan, Margaret, Cupples, Linda, Giblin, Iain and Sowman, Paul. (2023a). Object-experiencer verbs are labile: No agent means slower reading. Conference Abstract, Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing, 36: Literacy, Education and Language Processing. Pittsburgh, USA. https://lrdc.pitt.edu/HSP2023/
  • Ryan, Margaret, Cupples, Linda, Giblin, Iain and Sowman, Paul. (2023b). The agent frontrunner in a race against the causer. Conference abstract, The Australasian Society for Experimental Psychology Conference. ACT, Australia. https://psychology.anu.edu.au/news-events/events/australasian-society-experimental-psychology-conference#acton-tabs-link--tabs-0-container-1
  • Ryan, Margaret, Cupples, Linda, Giblin, Iain and Sowman, Paul. (2023c). “The agent and the causer in the processing race”. Conference abstract, Neurolinguistics in Sweden 2023: 1st meeting of the NLS network (Neurolinguistics in Sweden). Lund, Sweden. https://konferens.ht.lu.se/neurolinguistics-in-sweden-2023

Invited Talks

  • 2024    Keynote: Phonology Festa 2024, Kansai University, March 7-8 (Kathrine Demuth) Language processing speed in school students with hearing loss. NextSense Deaf and Hard of Hearing Masterclass Series. (Rebecca Holt)
  • 2023    Keynote: Société de Linguistique de Paris, June 17 (Kathrine Demuth)
  • Invited Speaker: Absolutely Audiology, Hearing Australia, 25th July (Nan Xu Rattanasone)
  • Invited Speaker: Australian Hearing Hub showcase & celebration, 16th August (Nan Xu Rattanasone)

Other Invited Lectures

2024    RIKEN Institute, Tokyo (March) (Katherine Demuth)

2023    Phonetics/Phonology Group, University of Edinburgh (Aug) (Katherine Demuth)

2023    Learnability Group, University of Edinburgh (July) (Katherine Demuth)

MRes and PhD Completions

2021-2024       Anwar Alkhudidi (PhD supervised by Katherine Demuth, Titia Benders, and Rebecca Holt)

2021-2024     Margaret Ryan (PhD supervised by Linda Cupples, Iain Giblin, and Paul Sowman)

2023 Mingjun Tang (MRes supervised by Shirley Wyver and Nan Xu Rattanasone)

Award - NSW Institute for Educational Research – Student Research Grant ($1077)

PhD Commencements

2022-2025       Feng Xu (Nan Xu Rattanasone, Ping Tang, and Katherine Demuth)

Feng has just arrived at MQ after 2 years of data collection on children with cochlear implants in Beijing.

2024-2027       Mingjun Tang (Alice Chik and Nan Xu Rattanasone) – working on the use of digital technology in bilingual educator training

Upcoming events

4th July 2024 Beyond Speech workshop - This year's theme will focus on language and literacy development in children who are deaf and hard of hearing. Registration and website TBC soon.

Contributions from Translation and Interpreting

Publications

  • Bachelier, K., & Orlando, M. (2024). Building capacity of interpreting services in Australian healthcare settings: the use of video remote interpreting during the COVID-19 pandemic. Media and Intercultural Communication, 2(1), 80-96. https://doi.org/10.22034/MIC.2024.446261.1015
  • Liao, S., Yu, L., Kruger, J-L., & Reichle, E. (2024). Dynamic reading in a digital age: new insights on cognition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 28(1), 43-55. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2023.08.002
  • Liao, S., & Kruger, J. L. (2023). Cognitive processing of subtitles charting the future by mapping the past. In A. Ferreira, & J. W. Schwieter (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of translation, interpreting and bilingualism (pp. 161-176). (Routledge Handbooks in Translation and Interpreting Studies). Taylor and Francis. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003109020-15
  • Chen, S., & Kruger, J-L. (2023). The effectiveness of computer-assisted interpreting: a preliminary study based on English-Chinese consecutive interpreting. Translation and Interpreting Studies, 18(3), 399-420. https://doi.org/10.1075/tis.21036.che
  • Orlando, M. (2023). Using smartpens and digital pens in interpreter training and interpreting research: taking stock and looking ahead. In G. Corpas Pastor, & B. Defrancq (Eds.), Interpreting technologies – current and future trends (pp. 6-26). (IVITRA Research in Linguistics and Literature; Vol. 37). John Benjamin's Publishing Company. https://doi.org/10.1075/ivitra.37.01orl

Research projects:

HDR completions:

  • Van Hoecke Senne (2023). Subtitles for access to education. Exploring the impact of intralingual and interlingual of subtitling in L2 English university lectures on cognitive load and comprehension. Doctoral thesis (co-tutelle). (Supervised at Macquarie by Jan-Louis Kruger and Marc Orlando)
  • Alsharif Ahmed (2023). The impact of subtitles on L2 incidental vocabulary acquisition by Saudi university students. Doctoral thesis. (Supervised by Jan-Louis Kruger and Marc Orlando)
  • Zhang Weiwei (2023). Coherence building in note-taking for Consecutive Interpreting: An investigation of professional and trainee interpreters' layout of notes. Doctoral thesis. (Supervised by Marc Orlando and Scott Barnes)

New appointments in Translation and Interpreting

Dr Vanesa Enriquez – Senior lecturer and expert in Translation Technologies: Vanesa Enriquez.

Dr Sophia Ra – Assistant lecturer in T&I, expert in healthcare interpreting and conference interpreting.

Joe Blythe

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News from the University of Western Australia

Welcome

Welcome to Munich-based Katharina Froedrich who has recently joined UWA Linguistics and Language Lab as a PhD candidate. Katharina is the recipient of a highly coveted Forrest Scholarship (4% success rate) which will allow her to design community-led participatory research in Northern Western Australia. Katharina is supervised by Celeste Rodríguez Louro, Luisa Miceli and Sally Dixon (University of New England). She will examine variation and change in varieties of Kriol / Aboriginal English.

PhD Completion

Heartfelt congratulations to Dr Connor Brown who has submitted and defended his PhD thesis titled ‘Temporality and aspect in Kununurra Kriol: Toginabad bla taim garra Kriol’. Connor’s thesis was passed with no changes. It was also unanimously recommended for the Dean’s List. Dr Brown was supervised by Maïa Ponsonnet, Marie-Eve Ritz, and Celeste Rodríguez Louro.

Employment

Congratulations to High Distinction Honours graduates Nefeli Perdikouli and Jason Rustandi who have taken up positions at Noongar Boodjar Language Centre.

HDR Student Updates

PhD candidate Madeleine Clews was awarded a travel bursary to attend the Australian Research Data Commons Summer School at Monash University in February. She is now immersed in writing up her thesis and preparing a presentation for Methods in Dialectology XVIII in July.

PhD candidate Lucía Fraiese has been writing an ethnographic account resulting from her fieldwork in 2022-2023 at a predominantly First Nations boarding school in Western Australia. In this piece, Lucía focuses on how she has shaped this methodology used by various sociolinguists researching in schools to fit the constraints and opportunities of this quite unique field site, and to ensure cultural safety. She has been invited to present some of her findings at the ‘Cycles of Aboriginal English’ colloquium to be held at Sociolinguistic Symposium 25. Lucía will also present a conference paper on (ING) variability among First Nations youth at Methods in Dialectology XVIII, in collaboration with Glenys Collard, Celeste Rodríguez Louro, James Walker (La Trobe University), and Matt Hunt Gardner (University of Oxford).

PhD candidate Alex Stephenson has successfully presented his research proposal. He is now finalising plans to travel to the field. Alex’s project examines post-digitisation futures for the storage, management, and dissemination of Aboriginal language centre archival material in Western Australia – forming part of the ARC Linkage Project ‘Life after digitisation: Future-proofing WA’s vulnerable cultural heritage’. Alex is working with four WA language centres: Mirima Dawang Woorlab-gerring Language and Culture Centre; the Kimberley Language Resource Centre; Wangka Maya Pilbara Aboriginal Language Centre; and Bundiyarra Irra Wangga Language Centre. Alex sits between Linguistics and Archaeology and is supervised by Benjamin Smith, Maïa Ponsonnet, Clint Bracknell, and Amy Budrikis.

Staff news

Maïa Ponsonnet was back at UWA in December 2023 and January 2024, collaborating with Luisa Miceli, Nefeli Perdikouli, and Alex Stephenson on various projects. This visit was also an opportunity to consult with the Noongar Boodjar Language Centre on the ALS-funded ‘Domestic use of Fire in Australia’ project.

Amanda Hamilton-Hollaway travelled to Philadelphia for the annual convention of the Modern Language Association (MLA). She, along with Celeste Rodríguez Louro and research intern Ewan O’Brien, had been invited to present a poster and receive an award at the convention because of their successful MLA grant application, ‘Decolonizing the Introductory Linguistics Curriculum’.

Amanda Hamilton-Hollaway submitted her PhD thesis, ‘Paradigm Shift: A theoretical and descriptive study of Mudburra-Kriol contact’, to the University of Queensland in January. In this study, Amanda explored structural changes that Mudburra (Ngumpin, Pama-Nyungan) has undergone in recent generations, with a focus on verb structure, bound pronouns, and core argument marking. Amanda is now awaiting the oral examination.

Amanda Hamilton-Hollaway continues to serve as the WA chair of OzCLO, the Australian Computational and Linguistic Olympiad, an annual competition in which high school students solve language-related problems. WA was strongly represented in the competition, with 129 of the 661 Australian teams coming from WA. OzCLO provides a great introduction to Linguistics for young scholars, and we look forward to seeing some of them in our Linguistics classes at UWA in the coming years!

Amanda Hamilton-Hollaway is enjoying another busy teaching semester, taking on Morphosyntax of the World's Languages (a second-year unit) and Language and Communication (a first-year unit). The department is particularly excited to note that enrolments in the first-year unit have increased significantly this year as compared to last year. 

Grants

Katharina Froedrich was awarded a Forrest Research Foundation scholarship (4% success rate). She is the first PhD student in Linguistics to receive one. The generous scholarship includes a research and travel allowance which will allow Katharina to conduct extensive fieldwork and collaborate with First Nations communities and scholars.

Publications

Brown, Connor (2024). Kriol. In L. Körtvélyessy & P. Štekauer (Eds.), Onomatopoeia in the World’s Languages (pp. 277–288). De Gruyter Mouton. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111053226-023

Brown, Connor & Ponsonnet, Maïa (2023). Event plurality and the verbal suffix ‑(a)bad in Australian Kriol. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages (e-pub ahead of print https://doi.org/10.1075/jpcl.00126.bro 

Froedrich, Katharina. (2023). Functions of ‘Uptalk’ in Australian English: A Tool to Express Humor. Zeitschrift fur Australienstudien 37: 49–60. https://australienstudien.org/past-issues/

Rodríguez Louro, Celeste, Glenys Collard, Madeleine Clews & Matt Hunt Gardner (2023). Quotation in earlier and contemporary Australian Aboriginal English. Language Variation and Change 35 (2). 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954394523000169

Rodríguez Louro, Celeste & Lucía Fraiese (2024). South to North: Diversity as an academic asset. In Dovchin, S., Dobinson, T., McAlinden, M. & Gong, Q. (Eds.), Linguistic diversity and discrimination: Autoethnographies from women in Academia. London: Routledge. 141–154. 10.4324/9781003317128-13

Stephenson, Alex, Ponsonnet, Maïa & Allassonnière-Tang, Marc. (2024) ‘Reflexemes’ – a first cross-linguistic insight into how and why reflexive constructions encode emotions. STUF - Language Typology and Universals 77 (1). 141–188. https://doi.org/10.1515/stuf-2024-2003

Ward, Ingrid, Ponsonnet, Maïa, Miceli, Luisa, Dotte, Emilie, & Rustandi, Jason (2023). How linguistic data can inform archaeological investigations: An Australian pilot study around combustion features. Open Archaeology, 9(1), [20220312]. https://doi.org/10.1515/opar-2022-0312

Awards

Language Lab, our segment on RTRFM radio, was awarded the 2023 Talkley Award by the Australian Linguistic Society. Listen to all episodes here: https://rtrfm.com.au/tags/language-lab/

Celeste Rodríguez Louro was awarded a Special Commendation for a 2023 Mid-Career Researcher Award, School of Social Sciences, UWA.

Invitations

In July 2023, Celeste Rodríguez Louro presented an invited paper titled ‘The Yarning Corpus: Aboriginal English in Southwest Western Australia’ at the Workshop on Language Corpora in Australia.

In August 2023, Glenys Collard and Celeste Rodríguez Louro presented an invited workshop titled ‘Working together to reduce inequality’ at the 32nd Australian Cardiovascular Health and Rehabilitation Association’s Annual Scientific Meeting, Perth, WA.

On 19 October 2023, Celeste Rodríguez Louro presented an invited seminar titled ‘What does it really mean to be culturally and linguistically diverse?’ for the CaLD Working Group at UWA.

In October 2023, Celeste Rodríguez Louro presented an invited paper titled ‘The proof is in the pudding: Barb stories as impetus for social justice’ at a University of Melbourne Symposium in honour of Barb Kelly. A collection of papers presented at this event is being compiled as a Special Issue of Australian Journal of Linguistics by Lauren Gawne, Katharine Parton, and Celeste Rodríguez Louro who all did their PhDs under Barb’s direct supervision.

In February 2024, Celeste Rodríguez Louro presented an invited lecture at the University of Cologne, Germany. The title of her presentation was ‘Decolonising sociolinguistics: The view from Australia’.

In June 2024, Celeste Rodríguez Louro and Glenys Collard will host an invited colloquium titled ‘Cycles of Australian Aboriginal English’ at Sociolinguistics Symposium 25, Curtin University, Perth, WA.

In late June 2024, Celeste Rodríguez Louro and Glenys Collard will deliver a F2F invited keynote presentation at the 2024 Symposium of the Voice and Speech Trainers Association (VASTA), Victorian College of the Arts. The title of their keynote presentation is ‘Hearing the voices: Embracing diversity in the study of language in society’.

Language Variation and Change, Australia 6

Language Variation and Change, Australia 6 was held at The University of Sydney as part of the 2023 Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society. This event was organised by Catherine Travis, James Walker, and Celeste Rodríguez Louro. The 2023 event marks a decade of Language Variation and Change, Australia. LVC-A 7 is scheduled for the 2025 Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society in the Gold Coast, QLD – so save the date!

UWA Linguistics Seminar Series, Semester 1, 2024

Seminar presentations are online, free of charge, through the following link:

https://uwa.zoom.us/j/6038975685?pwd=MEVGbE50dkFvT2M4NDl6YWFqL1pzdz09

Password: 250801

For queries, and to express an interest in presenting in the series, please contact Dr Celeste Rodríguez Louro on celeste.rodriguezlouro@uwa.edu.au

Date Time Title Speaker
07/3/24 1:00 Reawakening Wangaaypuwan and a plain language grammar Ms Lesley Woods (ANU)
21/3/24 1:00 Language variation in the media: A corpus linguistic approach Prof. Monika Bednarek (Sydney)
4/4/24 1:00 Sociotopography: The interaction of language, environment, culture and cognition Prof. Bill Palmer (Newcastle)
18/4/24 1:00 Building language technologies for speech recognition and speech synthesis Dr Ben Hutchinson (Google)
2/5/24 1:00 What's in an accent? Understanding the social meaning of language variation in Australian English

Prof. Catherine Travis (ANU)
30/5/24 1:00 Operationalising discourse-pragmatic variables: New challenges and approaches A/Prof. Chloé Diskin-Holdaway (Melbourne)
 

Celeste Rodríguez Louro

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News from RMIT Language Studies/Applied Linguistics

Recent publications

Brunetti, Edoardo. 2023. "Ethnoregionalism in France in the Post- war Period to 1981: the Breton and Occitan Movements." The French Australian Review (73): 90-115.

Crozet, Chantal, Mullan, Kerry, Qi, Jing, and Kianpour, Masoud. 2023. Educating critically about language and intercultural communication: What and who is at stake? Republished in In Julian Lee, Maki Yoshida, Jindan Ni, Kaye Quek, Ana Maria Ducasse (eds.). A Skilled Hand and a Cultivated Mind: A Culture of Learning and Teaching at RMIT University, chapter 2. RMIT Open Press.

Ducasse, Ana María. 2023. "Reflecting on Assessment Design and Feedback: Reflections on the Research and Practice of a Language and Culture Educator". In Julian Lee, Maki Yoshida, Jindan Ni, Kaye Quek, Ana Maria Ducasse (eds.). A Skilled Hand and a Cultivated Mind: A Culture of Learning and Teaching at RMIT University, chapter 11, RMIT Open Press, Melbourne, under licence CC BY-NC-ND.

Ducasse, Ana Maria, López Ferrero, C., & Mateo-Girona, M. T. 2023. Technology-enabled higher education academic writing feedback: Practices, needs and preferences. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 39(4): 48–73. https://doi.org/10.14742/ajet.8557

Lee, J., Yoshida, Maki, Ni, Jindan, Ducasse, Ana Maria. (eds.). 2023. A Skilled Hand and a Cultivated Mind: A Culture of Learning and Teaching at RMIT University. In Julian Lee, Maki Yoshida, Jindan Ni, Kaye Quek, Ana Maria Ducasse (eds.). A Skilled Hand and a Cultivated Mind: A Culture of Learning and Teaching at RMIT University, pp.13-35. RMIT Open Press.

Mullan, Kerry. 2024. Humour and creativity in a family of strangers on Facebook. In Priego-Valverde, B. (ed.). Interactional Humor: Multimodal Design and Negotiation, pp. 289-318. Berlin/Boston: Mouton De Gruyter.

Lee, JCH., Grenfell, D., Guevara, R., Mullan, Kerry, Ohashi, Hiroko, & Phipps, P. 2023. Learning in place: Study tours and the cultivation of grounded insight. In Julian Lee, Maki Yoshida, Jindan Ni, Kaye Quek, Ana Maria Ducasse (eds.). A Skilled Hand and a Cultivated Mind: A Culture of Learning and Teaching at RMIT University, chapter 8, RMIT Open Press.

Conference presentations

·      Fukuno, Maho. What is a ‘good’ translator? Translators’ perceptions and experiences. Paper presented at the 2023 AUSIT National Conference, University of New South Wales (23-25 November 2023).

·      Fukuno, Maho.  Living in Post-COVID Society: Mobility, Cross-Border and Fusion of People and Language (Connecting, Crossing, Overcoming). Paper co-presented with Assoc. Prof. Ikuko Nakane, Dr Masayoshi Ogino and Ms Nagisa Fukui, at the Japanese Studies Association of Australia 2023 Conference, University of New South Wales and University of Sydney (1-3 September 2023).

·      Mullan, Kerry. “Resident Superhero”: community veneration as social action. Keynote. Australasian Humour Studies Network Conference, University of Queensland, (7-9 February 2024).

HDR completions / milestones

The following students successfully passed their Confirmation of Candidature in August 2023:

Budur Alsulami: ‘The Saudi Arabia 2030 Strategy: translation reception and translator readiness (supervisors Kerry Mullan and Erika Gonzalez Garcia)’

Temiti Lehartel: ‘Rethinking Remoteness and the Meaning of Land: The Role of Contemporary Indigenous Oceanian Literature’ (supervisors Kerry Mullan and Yaso Nadarajah).

Kerry Mullan

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News from La Trobe University

PhD Completion – Rael Stanley, Dialect Variation in Lisu: Fricatives, Affricates and Tones (2024)

New PhD Students – Rana Hosseinpoor will be working on the phonetics of the Azeri language, Adam Levy will be working on the grammar of Chorki and Kezha, Walid Alofi will be working on the language practices of Arabic-speaking children in Sydney schools.

Conference information – Methods in Dialectology XVIII will be held 1-5 July 2024 (https://www.latrobe.edu.au/events/all/methods-in-dialectology-xviii)

James Walker

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News from Griffith University

New Staff in Languages and Linguistics

Two new continuing staff members joined the languages and linguistics group: Dr. Matthew Callahan and Dr. Desiree Kawabata. Matthew is a Hispanic sociolinguist, specialising in Chilean Spanish, with other interests and expertise in literature and in translation studies. He was appointed as a Lecturer in Spanish. Desiree’s appointment is as a Scholarly Teaching Fellow in the areas of academic English, applied linguistics and TESOL. Her PhD was in systemic-functional linguistics, and testing assessment and validation.

Publications (all open access)

Bromhead, Helen. 2023. Making messages effective for all: South East Queensland flood warnings and alerts. Australian Journal of Emergency Management 38(4): 40-46.

Bromhead, Helen & Goddard, Cliff. 2023. Applied semantics and climate communication. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics.

Davis, E.E., & Heinrichs D.H. 2023. Keep Our Mob Safe: Multimodal COVID-19 Public Health Outreach to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Youth in Australia. Journal of Discrimination and Language.

Goddard, Cliff & Levisen, Carsten. 2023. Contrastive metapragmatics and the shifting meanings of “sarcasm” in English and Danish. Contrastive Pragmatics (2023) 1–24.

Heinrichs, D.H. & Tapia Parada, C. 2024. Decolonising the teaching of speaking Spanish. PressBooks. An interactive textbook.

Kazmaly, Alena. 2024. The lexical semantics of personality words: On ‘shy’ and ‘outgoing’. Lingua 302, 103695.

Rarrick, Samantha. 2024. Tok Pisin metalanguage: why is Sinasina Sign Language not tok ('language')?. Language Sciences, 102.

Shoecraft, Kelly, Helen Massa, & Leanne Kenway. 2024. Translanguaging pedagogies: Using an action research approach to support English as an Additional Language (EAL) students in a first-year undergraduate anatomy course. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, Volume 68, 101357.

Veliz, L., Díaz, A., & Heinrichs, D.H. (2024). Pluriversalizing the teaching and learning of Spanish: Insights from research to praxis Special Issue Introduction. Critical Multilingualism Studies.

Conference Organisation

Helen Bromhead & Alena Kazmaly, with Ida Diget organised a panel for ALS 2023, titled “Linguistics for the polycrisis”.

Eisenchlas, Susana, Andrea Schalley & Anastassia Zabrodskaja co-organised a conference on Research on Social and Affective Factors in Home Language Maintenance and Development (HOLM 2023). It took place in Tallinn (Estonia) on December 14-16, 2023.

Conferences and Seminars

  • Arab, Reza & Heather Anderson. 2024. The language of prison radios: Humour and coping. 30th Australasian Humour Studies Network (AHSN) conference, University of Queensland, 7-9 February 2024.
  • Bromhead, Helen gave a presentation at AFACC-23, the leading emergency management conference in Australasia and a poster at Australian Disaster Resilience conference, both entitled: ‘Making messages more effective for all: Flood warnings and alerts Southeast Queensland February–March 2022’.
  • Eisenchlas, Susana & Andrea Schalley. 2023. Developing a quantitative survey to study social and affective factors in home language maintenance: Pitfalls and possible solutions. HOLM23, Tallinn University, Estonia, December 15, 2023.
  • Goddard, Cliff. 2023. The conceptual semantics and lexicogrammar of the English verb “speak”, and why it matters for linguistics. Annual Conference of Australian Linguistic Society (ALS) (30 November 2023). Sydney University.
  • Goddard, Cliff. 2023. Presented a seminar at Helsinki University, Finland: “The archiecture of the lexicon (NSM approach)” and a one-day PhD course at Aarhus, Denmark on “Intercultural semantics and pragmatics”. November.
  • Rarrick, Sam. 2024. Presented on "Eyeblinks, prosody, and mobilizing sign language documentation" at Macquarie University's Department of Linguistics Research Seminar series. February.

HDR Updates

Lisa Petersen, HDR candidate, spent 3 months in Hawaii collecting sign language data with an expert consultant on Hawaii Sign Language. Lisa is analysing phonology and variation in the sign language.

Dr. Ida Stevia Diget received her PhD in November 2023, for her thesis titled: “Minimal Language for Translatable Public Health Messaging: Mapping the Terrain. Standard Translatable English Principles for Public Health Guideline Booklet”. Click here [https://www.translatableenglish.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/STEPs-For-Public-Health-FINAL.pdf] for a pedagogical guideline booklet for public health messaging, developed as part of Ida’s PhD research.

HDR candidate Alena Kazmaly delivered her TCRM seminar in August 2023. Provisonal thesis title: The Lexical Semantics of English "Personality" Words in Cross-linguistic Perspective.

Academic Visits

Yuanmeng Li (Beihang University, China) returned to China in February after nearly a year at Griffith. She worked with Cliff Goddard on semantics and grammaticalisation of Chinese posture verbs.  Noah Rørbæk (Aarhus University Denmark) visited for three weeks in March. He is a partner investigator on the large “Danish in the Making” project.

New Academic Projects

Heinrichs, Danielle. Generative AI and Multilingual Health and Crisis Translation. In cooperation with the University of Hong Kong, University of New South Wales and the Children’s Tumour Foundation Australia. With Dr Jack Tsao, Dr Michael Camit

Heinrichs, Danielle, Trust in Multilingual Accents in Translated Health Crisis Communication: Perspectives of Ukrainian Refugee Students in Germany. In cooperation with Koblenz University Germany. With Prof. Dr. Evghenia Golstev.

Public Writing and Other Academic Outreach

  • Linguistics students Isabella Schulz, Lissara Bergamaschi and Raiã Pinhati produce the Langwich podcast in which diverse topics in linguistics are discussed with special guests. Langwich is available on all major podcast provider services. 18 episodes have been released so far. The interviews have already been downloaded in 191 cities across 48 countries [https://linktr.ee/langwich]
  • Bromhead, Helen. 2023. Ecological emotions in an era of global boiling: A view from linguistics. In Chronicle of Healthcare and Narrative Medicine [https://www.medicinanarrativa.eu/ecological-emotions-in-an-era-of-global-boiling-by-linguistic-helen-bromhead] July.
  • Bromhead, Helen. 2023. Should Australia abandon “bushfire” and join the rest of the world? In Cosmos Magazine [https://cosmosmagazine.com/news/should-we-abandon-bushfire-and-join-world/] December.
  • Heinrichs, D.H. 2023. Multilingualism, trust and GenAI. German Week Brisbane, Consul for the Federal Republic of Germany. October.
  • Heinrichs, D.H. 2024. Roundtable on multilingual approaches to disaster preparedness. RMIT, Online. January.

Other

Sam Rarrick continues to collaborate with Gidarjil Central Queensland Language Centre, Bundaberg, supporting community language work and engaging with Traditional Owners in the region.

Helen Bromhead and Cliff Goddard continue to work with Griffith’s university-wide Climate Action Beacon [https://www.griffith.edu.au/research/climate-action]

Cliff Goddard

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News from the Language and Communication Research Hub Centre for Indigenous Health Equity Research Central Queensland University

Seminar Series (Communication, Health, and Social and Cultural Well-being)

A major development within the Jawun Research Centre has been the establishment of a new Seminar series, CLASS (Cairns Linguistics and Anthropology Seminar Series), convened by Professor Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald, Professor Rosita Henry, and Professor R. M. W. Dixon. The CLASS seminars meet once a month. The talks presented so far are:

22 January 2024, Professor Borut Telban (Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts). Kunaypa historicity: Conceptual specificity of temporal reciprocity in the Sepik, Papua New Guinea

21 March 2024, Dr Michael Wood (JCU/CQU). Paratexting Patrol Reports into the Intertexuality of Situation Reports: toward a history of colonial texts in PNG?

Planned talks are:

2 May 2024, Dr Maria Wronska-Friend. Polish emigrant culture.

23 May 2024, Prof Rosita Henry. Indi-Kindi: An Ethnographic Case Study of an Indigenous Early Childhood Education Program.

Expressions of interest to present a talk in the series on topics in linguistic anthropology and/or anthropological linguistics can be sent to a.aikhenvald@cqu.edu.au.

Staff news

Congratulations to Dr Christoph Holz who has been awarded a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the University of Naples L’Orientale, Department of Asia, Africa and the Mediterranean, “Documentation of two Oceanic languages of New Ireland: Lavatbura-Lamusong and Konomala”.

Professor Alexandra Aikhenvald has finalised a paperback edition of the fundamental Oxford Handbook of Evidentiality (published in February 2024, Oxford University Press). She is finalising her comprehensive monograph A guide to gender and classifiers (forthcoming, Oxford University Press), in addition to working on a comprehensive grammar of Yalaku, a Ndu language of Papua New Guinea and co-editing a special issue 'Linguistics in strange and familiar places' (Language Sciences), jointly with Anne Storch and Viveka Vellupilai. In December, Hannah Sarvasy and Alexandra sent off an edited volume Clause chaining in the languages of the world to Oxford University Press. This volume (approximate length 300,000 words) contains twenty-nine chapters dealing with various aspects of the phenomenon of clause chaining across the world. The production process has just begun, and the volume should be published in November 2024.

Thanks to the internet connection and access to WhatsApp in Brazilian Amazonia, Alexandra continues her work with the extant speakers of the Wamiarikune dialect of Tariana in Iauaretê and São Gabriel da Cachoeira (Amazonas, Brazil) and also Gramado (Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil), working closely together with the Tariana communities in providing materials for the Tariana school Enu Irine Idakini in Iauaretê. She finalised a translation of her 1999 book Tariana texts and cultural context (Lincom Europa) into Portuguese, to make the cultural information accessible to the Tariana people. She continues her collaboration and interaction with the Yalaku and Manambu communities in the Sepik region of Papua New Guinea, which were severely affected by the recent earthquake. She also continues her work as a member of the Expert Committee for the World Atlas of Languages (WAL) at UNESCO, supplying materials on endangered languages of her areas of expertise, and has been appointed to a number of panels, including Cambridge Elements in Linguistic Diversity (Cambridge University Press). She continues performing her duties as the first-named editor of the series Brill's studies in language, cognition, and culture. She also chairs the Nominations Committee in the Jawun Research Centre.

Her upcoming plenary presentations (via zoom) are:

  • The reality of evidentiality', 24-25 October 2024, International Conference 'Reality and evidentiality: language, cognition, society', Cyprus.
  • 'Becoming an albino: fieldwork in the Sepik region of Papua New Guinea', 25-26 November 2024, RAN Academy of Sciences.

Professor R. M. W. (Bob) Dixon is continuing his on-going engagement with the Dyirbal-speaking communities of North Queensland and with the descendants of the Yidinji speakers. He is providing information and advice on introducing original Dyirbal language concepts and terminology within the framework of Indigenous Engagement and First Nations’ Research at CQUniversity, as a priority within the Jawun Research Centre. He has just signed the contract, with De Gruyter Mouton, for his new book The anatomy of avoidance: A full story of Jalnguy, the 'mother-in-law language' of Dyirbal. This is focused on the use of Jalnguy, the special avoidance style (nicknamed ‘Mother-in-law language’). Jalnguy has the same phonology and grammar as the everyday style of speech, but an entirely different lexicon. His monograph, to be finalised in mid-year, is a comprehensive study of Jalnguy with comparative materials from other Australian languages.

Dr Brigitta Flick continues working at the Jawun Research Centre as a Publication Officer within the research projects of the Centre.

Yann LeMoullec, a PhD student at LACITO (Paris), with Professor Dr Isabelle Bril and Alexandra Aikhenvald as his supervisors, is currently working on a comprehensive study of gender and other grammatical topics in Angaataha, an Angan language.

Dr Pema Wangdi, an expert in Brokpa and other Bhutanese languages and Adjunct Research Fellow at Jawun, continues working on the revision of his PhD, a comprehensive grammar of Brokpa.

The following colleagues have been awarded Adjunct Appointments at Jawun within the Language and Communication Hub:

Dr Christoph Holz, an expert on Oceanic languages of New Ireland; Dr Françoise Daquin, an expert in French history and literature, working on French settlers in Queensland; Dr Tahnee Innes, a member of the Yawuru nation (WA), an expert in cultural anthropology and museum studies, with a focus on Jirrbal culture and heritage; Professor Chia-jung Pan, Professor of Linguistics at the Center for Linguistic Sciences of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences, Beijing Normal University, China, an expert on Taiwanese languages.

Visiting scholar in 2024

Dr Katarzyna I. Wojtylak (PhD James Cook University, 2017) is a Research Fellow at the University of Warsaw and an expert on Witotoan languages and other languages of Colombian Amazon. She is planning to spend a few months as a Visiting Fellow at the Jawun Research Centre at the end of 2024, working on language contact across Amazonia in collaboration with Professors Aikhenvald and Dixon,

Publications

Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 2023. ‘Speaking about knowledge: Language ecology and evidentiality’. Studies in Language doi10.1075/sl.23004.aik

Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 2024. ‘How well-being needs language’. Special issue of Linguapax 11: 11-36, edited by Justyna Olko and Alexander Andrason, translated into Catalan.

Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 2024. ‘Language loss and language gain: a view from the Arawak language family’. Contribuciones al estudio del mundo Arawak, edited by Nubia Tobar, Jorge González, Harol Castaño, and Caridad Brito. Bogotá: Editorial Uniguajira, pp. 12-35.

Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 2024. 'Trade, mines, and language: the Chinese in Papua New Guinea' The Chinese in Papua New Guinea: Past, Present and Future, Edited by Anna Hayes, Rosita Henry, and Michael Wood. Canberra: the ANU Press. DOI: http://doi.org/10.22459/CPNG.2024

Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. ed. 2024. The Oxford Handbook of evidentiality. Paperback edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Holz, Christoph. 2023. Tiang texts (5 parts, total 409 pp). Publication within Texts in the Languages of the Pacific (Language and Linguistics in Melanesia/LLM) (the series edited by Alexandra Aikhenvald, Deborah Hill, and Edgar Suter), 2023, issue 5. https://www.langlxmelanesia.com/tilp

Pan, Chia-jung. 2023. 54. Saaroa. In P. J. Li, E. Zeitoun and R. De Busser (eds.), Handbook of Formosan Languages Online: The Indigenous Languages of Taiwan. Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/2772-5766_HFLO_COM_305130

Wangdi, Pema. 2023. 'Where have adjectives come from in Dzongkha?' Journal of South Asian Languages and Linguistics 10.1, https://doi.org/10.1515/jsall-2023-1010.

Skribnik, Elena and Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald. 2024. ‘Evidentiality in Northern Asia’, in The languages of Northern Asia, edited by Edward Vajda. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, pp. 1006-1072

Alexandra (Sasha) Aikhenvald

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News from the ANU

Summary Scholars Program

Thirteen summer scholars (undergraduate or masters) were hosted by ANU Linguistics for an eight-week research program between November 20, 2023 and January 19, 2024. Seven scholars came from interstate (Universities of Melbourne, New South Wales, Sydney, and Griffith University), one from Victoria University (Wellington NZ), and five from the ANU.  They were mostly funded by the Australian Signals Directorate.

Scholars were assigned to one of eight research projects:

  • Forensic Linguistics (Mimicking an Individual's Writing Style Using ChatGPT, Sub-band Cepstrum for Linguistic Analysis, Forensic Text Comparison in Japanese): Supervisors Shunichi Ishihara and Frantz Clermont
  • Verbal Morphology & Holmer’s fieldnotes: Wakka Wakka Deep Data Dive: Supervisors Denise Angelo and Daniel Majchrzak
  • Dharug documentation push: Supervisor Denise Angelo
  • Voices of regional Australia: Supervisors Ksenia Gnevsheva and Catherine Travis
  • Muruwari language revitalisation project: Supervisors Roy Barker, Alison Mount and Jane Simpson
  • Warumungu stops analysis: Supervisor Jane Simpson
  • Polarity and gradience in Wardaman verbal predicates: Supervisor Francesca Merlan
  • Pointing gestures in Ku Waru: Supervisor Alan Rumsey

Depending on funding, administration and supervisor availability, we will advertise in July this year for another round of summer scholarships.

PhD Completion

Congratulations to Gan Qiao, James Gray, Naijing Liu, and Wendi Xue who have been awarded their PhD degree recently.  Gan’s thesis title is Ethnic variation in its social context: Evidence from the English of Chinese Australians (Supervisor: Catherine Travis); James’ thesis title is Topics in Pintupi-Luritja Syntax and Semantics (supervisor: Jane Simpson); Naijing’s thesis title is Segmental and Prosodic Phonology and Morphology in Tsum: A Language of Nepal (Supervisor: Wayan Arka); and Wendi’s thesis title is Uncle-type Kinship Terms in Sinitic Languages: An NSM-based Semantic Typological Approach (supervisor: Zhengdao Ye).

Book launch: The Lexicon of Proto Oceanic

Tuesday 24 October saw the celebration of a historic event at the Australian National University. That was the launch, in the famous Coombs Tea Room, of the 6th and final volume of The lexicon of Proto Oceanic: The culture and environment of ancestral Oceanic society. This particular book, People: society, represents the culmination of a massive research product over the last 30 or more years by Andrew Pawley, Malcolm Ross and Meredith Osmond, of the (then) Linguistics Department in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies. This endeavour followed on from and complemented the Research School’s earlier interdisciplinary “Comparative Austronesian Project”, according to Professor James Fox, who launched the book. The project was “Andy’s brainchild” and reflects his lexicographical experience, according to Malcolm Ross, whose expertise was responsible for much of the phonological reconstruction of the cognates, according to Meredith Osmond, whose devoted participation in the project, which begun by “pure luck” changed and expanded her life during the next 30 years, she said. The six volumes together provide a vast repository of lexical comparisons from about 500 languages, making a massive contribution to an understanding of Pacific culture over the last 3000 years, according to Beth Evans. Nick Evans emphasised the “unparalleled” nature of this work: no such resource is available for any other language family of the world. I might add that a work such as this is can also be viewed as a work of applied historical linguistics. (By Harold Koch)

Lexicon of Proto Oceanic

Celebrating the launch of Lexicon of Proto Oceanic: a delicious cake graced by the covers of this magnum opus. 

Australian National Dictionary Centre (ANDC)

A group of eminent lexicographers from Germany, France, and South Africa, along with students from Kazakhstan and Macau, visited Australia in late March and early April. They were promoting the European Master of Lexicography (EMLex) program, which is sponsored by Erasmus Mundus, and visited Macquarie University, ANU, the University of Melbourne, Monash University, and Adelaide University. At ANU, we held a day-long symposium on Tuesday 2 April on Lexicography and Dictionaries that profiled some of the current lexicography taking place in Australia (presenters included Amanda Laugesen, Lauren Reed, Zhengdao Ye), and discussed some of the current challenges and opportunities that lexicography faces.  (From Amanda Laugesen, Director of ANDC)

Publications

Arka, I Wayan, and Li-Chen Yeh. 2023. "LFG and Austronesian languages." In Handbook of Lexical Functional Grammar edited by M. Dalrymple, 1289-1367. Berlin: Language Science Press,

Hemmings, Charlotte, I Wayan Arka, Engga Zakaria  Sangian, Dendi Wijaya, and Mary Dalrymple. 2023. "Challenges in Enggano Orthography Development."  Language Documentation and Description 23(1) (4):1–19.

Rajeg, Gede Primahadi Wijaya, and I Wayan Arka. 2023. " Usage-based perspective on argument realisation: A corpus study of Indonesian BUY verbs in applicative construction with -kan." In Applicatives in Austronesian Languages edited by Jocelyn Aznar, Christian Döhler and Jonzina Vander Klok, 83–114. Permanent  URL: doi:10.15026/0002000019: NUSA 74.

Musgrave, Simon, I Wayan Arka, and Gede Primahadi Wijaya Rajeg. 2024. "Applicative constructions in standard Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia)." In Applicative Constructions in the World's Languages edited by Fernando Zúñiga and Denis Creissels, 279-303. De Gruyter.

Arka, I Wayan. 2024. "The dynamics of grammar and socio-pragmatics of prominence in Balinese." In Prominence in Austronesian, edited by Beth Evans, Åshild Næss and Jozina Vander Klok, 169-200. De Gruyter Mouton.

Dahm, M. R., & Crock, C. (2023). The pragmatics of diagnostic uncertainty: A closer look at hedges and shared understanding in diagnostic statements. In S. Bigi & M. G. Rossi (Eds.), A Pragmatic Agenda for Healthcare: Fostering inclusion and active participation through shared understanding (pp. 330-358). John Benjamins.

Dahm, M. R., Raine, S. E., Slade, D., Chien, L. J., Kennard, A., Walters, G., ... & Talaulikar, G. (2023). Shared decision making in chronic kidney disease: a qualitative study of the impact of communication practices on treatment decisions for older patients. BMC Nephrology, 24(1), 383.

Dahm, M. R., Raine, S. E., Slade, D., Chien, L. J., Kennard, A., Walters, G., ... & Talaulikar, G. (2024). Older patients and dialysis shared decision-making. Insights from an ethnographic discourse analysis of interviews and clinical interactions. Patient Education and Counseling, 122, 108124.

Li, J., Hardie, R. A., Dahm, M. R., & Georgiou, A. (2024). The impact and usability of the eRIC system in the ICU: a qualitative study. In MEDINFO 2023-The future is accessible: Proceedings of the 19th World Congress on Medical and Health Informatics (pp. 1096-1100). IOS Press.

Macqueen, S., Collins, L., Brookes, G., Demjén, Z., Semino, E., & Slade, D. (2024). Laughter in hospital emergency departments. Discourse Studies, 26(3).

O’Shannessy, Carmel (2024). The influences of adult and child speakers in the emergence of Light Warlpiri, an Australian mixed language. In Sanz-Sánchez, Israel (Ed.) Language acquisition across the lifespan and language change: Historical sociolinguistic perspectives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 179-202 

O’Shannessy, Carmel (2024). Source language influences in the Australian mixed language, Light Warlpiri.  Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages.

O'Shannessy, Carmel, Vanessa Davis, Jessie Bartlett, Alice Nelson, Denise Foster. 2023. Developing the Little Kids’ Word List app, a fair assessment tool of communicative development for young Aboriginal children in multilingual families in Central Australia. Studies in Language Assessment. 12, no. 2: 286-320.

Ye, Zhengdao (2024). Chinese emotions: words, meaning and culture. In Liwei Jiao (ed.). The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Language and Culture. London: Routledge, 192-206. 

Public Writing

Wierzbicka, A. (2024, February 28). We need a new story about meaning: Universal human concepts and the unique phrase “us people”. IAI TV. 

In the News/Media

NSMLab@anu

Noah Rørbæk (Aarhus University Denmark) is visiting the Lab in April for a month. He is a partner investigator on the large “Danish in the Making” project which was inspired by Lauren Sadow’s PhD thesis An NSM-based Cultural Dictionary of Australian English: From Theory to Practice.

Zhengdao Ye and Wayan Arka

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News from OzSpace

The OzSpace project is continuing, with several recent developments.

Thesis submission and reports from the field

Tom Ennever submitted his Monash PhD thesis Topics in a Grammar of Space of Kukatja at the end of last year. He is currently back in Balgo (WA) to deliver further community outputs arising from his PhD (a curated and geotagged set of videos), finalize proofs of A Dictionary of Ngardi, and pilot future collaborative research exploring language change over time. When that field visit is finished, Tom will be taking up a postdoctoral position at the University of Surrey in June 2024.

Laurits Stapput Knudsen recently returned from final the fieldwork portion of his PhD in Aurukun. He spent February showing recordings made during his project to the Wik community; depositing materials in community archives; checking translations and transcriptions; and finalising small amounts of data collection. Laurits is returning to Europe in May to continue his work as a visiting scholar at Lund University in Sweden. Eleanor Yacopetti is busy coding and analysing data from her last field trip, and is preparing for another visit to the field in June-July this year to work with her Kune collaborators. Joe Blythe is also preparing for another visit to Wadeye to work with the Murrinhpatha community in the middle of the year.

International symposium on environment and spatial language and cognition

The OzSpace team will be running a symposium at the forthcoming triennial International Conference on Spatial Cognition (ICSC) to be held this September in Rome. The symposium focuses on Factors that mediate between environment and spatial cognition, and will include a dozen papers from disciplines ranging from linguistics and anthropology through phenomenology to cognitive neuroscience, reporting on new findings from Indigenous Australia, Mesoamerica, South America, the Middle East, North Asia, and Southeast Asia. A full description of the symposium is as follows:

The topographic features of the environment we live in do not map perfectly onto spatial categories encoded in the human mind. However, a range of studies have shown spatial cognition, both static conceptual categories and dynamic practices such as wayfinding, to be sensitive to specificities of the local environment to some extent. This symposium explores the range of factors that foster or disrupt this relationship between the environment and spatial cognition. Previous research has shown language to be one such factor (Levinson et al. 1992; Pederson et al. 1998; Majid et al. 2004; Senft 2007), other studies have emphasized the role of demographic variables including gender (Harris & Gitterman 1978; Wolbers & Hegarty 2010; Halpern 2012; van der Ham, Dijkerman & van Stralen 2021), occupation (Maguire et al. 2000; Shapero 2017), education (Adamou and Shen 2017; Lin 2022) and socio-economic status (Wassmann & Dasen 1998; Mishra, Dasen & Niraula 2003; Dasen & Mishra 2010). The Sociotopographic Model (STM) attempts to model the roles of sociocultural practices and language use in mediating between the environment, the linguistic system, and spatial cognition (Palmer et al. 2017, Lum et al. 2022). However, much more remains to be learned about the precise mechanisms at play, including which sociocultural practices most powerfully influence spatial cognition, the role played by social networks in the diffusion or maintenance of spatial frames of reference in both language and cognition, the degree to which linguistic categories exist independently of the corresponding conceptual categories, and the extent to which the interface between cognitive and linguistic representations are mediated by language use, even if only in the form of ‘internal monologue’, self-directed speech, or [meta]linguistic reflection.

This symposium advances knowledge on factors mediating between environment and spatial cognition by bringing together new cognitive and linguistic findings from current research by leading investigators in diverse disciplines ranging from anthropology and phenomenology to linguistics and cognitive neuroscience. These include novel findings in gesture, pointing practices, wayfinding, mental maps, environment-anchored toponyms, motion, cultural adaptation, and sensitivity to the earth’s magnetic field. Papers included present novel data from Indigenous Australia, Mesoamerica, South America, the Middle East, North Asia, and Southeast Asia. The findings presented in this symposium cast important light on the way humans respond to their environments across a range of cognitive modalities, and the sociocultural, perceptual, and behavioural factors that mediate in that relationship.

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Forthcoming Events

Annual Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society

The Australian National University, 26 to 29 November 2024

Call for masterclasses and themed sessions

We invite proposals for masterclasses and themed sessions at the annual conference of the Australian Linguistic Society held at The Australian National University, Canberra from 26 to 29 November 2024.

Masterclasses: These will be held on 26 November before the start of the academic program of the conference. Masterclasses are teaching-focused sessions aimed at professional development. Examples are masterclasses on statistics or phonetic analysis. They are typically facilitated by an expert in the relevant field. Masterclasses may have a specific audience, e.g. students, or be open to anyone. Proposals are welcome on any area that is relevant to linguistics.

Please submit proposals for masterclasses, maximum one A4 page, with the name of the facilitator(s), proposed length (half day/full day or an hours value) and a short statement on their relevant expertise, as well as a brief statement on the rationale for proposing the masterclass, and the intended audience. The Program Committee will select proposals based on expertise of the facilitator, fit with the schedule, rationale and intended audience.

Themed sessions: Themed sessions are regular conference sessions that are part of the academic program of the conference (27-29 November), centred around a special topic or coherent theme, such as Australian Indigenous languages or Laboratory Phonology. We invite proposals for sessions on any aspect of linguistics. Following the general call for papers, authors will be able to indicate whether they are submitting their abstracts to accepted themed sessions or to the general program. Abstracts that are submitted to a themed session without prior consultation with session organisers will be reviewed as part of the general program if the organisers are of the opinion that they don’t fit into their session. Organisers of themed sessions are in charge of quality assurance guaranteeing that their program meets the general standard of the conference and will review abstracts submitted to their sessions using the same criteria as the main program.

Please submit proposals for themed sessions, maximum one A4 page, with the name(s) of the organiser(s), intended length of the session (number of talks and possible discussion session), questions the session is seeking to address, and a short statement on the topic and some contextualisation of how it fits in within the relevant field and the discipline. If possible, also supply a list of tentative participants and any designated keynote speakers. The Program Committee will select proposals based on the relevance of the topic and the academic quality of the session.

Address for submissions: conf@als.asn.au

Deadline for proposals: 21 April 2024

Announcements of accepted workshops/themed sessions: 3 May 2024

All abstracts will be reviewed by the ALS Program Committee

For further information and updates please see the ALS website or send an email to the ALS2024 Conference team: conf@als.asn.au

Sociolinguistics Symposium 25

Ordinariness and Innovation

Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia

24-27 June 2024

As a premier gathering of international sociolinguists, the biennial Sociolinguistics Symposium has emerged as a unique and innovative forum to develop and exchange new ideas, broaden the scope of the discipline, and create new academic networks. From its beginnings as a small meeting of UK-based academics in 1976, it has grown into the largest sociolinguistic conference in the world.

The 25th Sociolinguistics Symposium (SS25) – the conference’s first appearance in Australia, on Whadjuk Noongar Boodja [Perth land of Noongar people] – explores diverse manifestations of Ordinariness and Innovation.

Innovation in language practice is increasingly celebrated, at times even romanticised – however this inadvertently invents the linguistic Other through exoticising the ordinary epistemologies of language. Conversely, through a contemplating of what ordinariness entails or how it is imposed, the complex natures of communities, patterns, and hierarchies are often interrogated. Continued explorations of Ordinariness or Innovation across ecologies, landscapes, platforms, modalities, pedagogies, disability and neurodiverse cultures are required to further critical assessments for theory and application. Considerations of languages on the periphery – Indigenous and migrant, minority and endangered – including engagement with everyday policy and practice, and development of innovative technologies, are particularly timely, in light of the UN’s International Decade of Indigenous Languages (IDIL 2022-2032).

Please see further details here. 

Sender Dovchin

Methods in Dialectology XVIII

La Trobe University 1-5 July 2024

Please see further details here.

Field Matters Workshop

At ACL 2024, Friday 16 August 2024, Bangkok, Thailand

Contact: fieldmattersworkshop@gmail.com and via the website

Important dates:

  • Paper submission deadline: May 17 (Friday), 2024
  • Notification of acceptance: June 17 (Monday), 2024
  • Camera-ready paper due: July 1 (Monday), 2024
  • Workshop dates: August 16, 2024

Field linguistics plays a crucial role in the development of linguistic theory and universal language modelling, as it provides uncontested, the only way to obtain structural data about the rapidly diminishing diversity of natural languages.

The Field matters workshop aims to bring together the urgent needs of field linguists and the vast community of NLP practitioners, developing up-to-date NLP tools for easier, faster, more reliable data collection and annotation.

This year we are adding a *special track dedicated to the indigenous languages of Thailand and South-East Asia*. We encourage you to submit theses on this topic, although general submissions are also welcomed.

We are particularly interested in the following topics:

  • Application of NLP to field linguistics workflow;
  • The impact, benefits and harms of NLP-assisted fieldwork;
  • Transfer learning for under-resourced language processing;
  • The use of fieldwork data to build NLP systems;
  • Modelling morphology and syntax of typologically diverse languages in the low resource setting;
  • Speech processing for under-resourced languages;
  • Machine-readable field linguistic datasets and computational analysis of field linguistics datasets;
  • Using technology to preserve culture via language;
  • Improving ways of interaction with Indigenous communities;
  • Special track: Indigenous languages of Thailand and South-East Asia.

We accept three types of papers:

  • non-archival submissions: abstracts (2-page) or papers (up to 8-page) that can present already published work or work in progress (note that we accept non-archival submissions even after the main deadline);
  • short archival submissions: 4-page papers that present new work;
  • long archival submissions: 8-page papers that present new work.

The special track submissions can be either long or short and either archival or non-archival.

We offer the following ways of presenting the papers:

  • the main section;
  • poster sections.

The way a paper will be presented will be determined during the review process.

All submissions should be anonymized. We are subjected to the ACL Anonymity Policy. ACL changed its policy for review and citation, and no anonymity period will be required. Dual submissions with the main conference are allowed, but authors must declare dual submission by entering the paper’s main conference submission id. The reviews for the submission for the main conference will be automatically forwarded to the workshop and taken into consideration when your paper is evaluated. Authors of dual-submission papers accepted to the main conference should retract them from the workshop by.

Papers posted to preprint servers such as arxiv can be submitted without any restrictions on when they were posted.

The workshop will run its own review process, and papers can be submitted directly to the workshop via OpenReview.

The workshop will take place at ACL 2024. Both papers and abstracts must follow the ACL 2024 format. Please do not modify these style files

Organizers:

  • Oleg Serikov (KAUST, HSE University)
  • Elena Klyachko (HSE University)
  • Francis Tyers (Indiana University)
  • Ekaterina Vylomova (University of Melbourne)
  • Éric Le Ferrand (Boston College)
  • Saliha Muradoğlu (The Australian National University (ANU))
  • Ekaterina Voloshina (Independent Researcher)
  • Anna Postnikova (Independent Researcher)

Please see further details here.

Salinha Muradoğlu

2024 LCNAU Eighth Biennial Colloquium

University of Sydney’s School of Languages and Cultures, 27-29 November 2024

Submissions for abstracts and panel proposals are now open for the 2024 LCNAU Eighth Biennial Colloquium.

The Languages and Cultures Network for Australian Universities (LCNAU) 2024 Colloquium will explore the theme ‘Trans/Formation: research and education in languages and cultures’. LCNAU invites scholars, practitioners, early career researchers and postgraduate students to submit abstract and panel proposals on a wide range of interest areas.

Submissions close on Monday 15 April 2024, 11:45pm AEST.

Please see further details here.

19th Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology (SST2024)

The Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association (ASSTA) and the University of Melbourne are pleased to host the 19th Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology (SST2024), 3-5 December 2024, Melbourne, Australia. It is the biennial conference of ASSTA for international researchers focussing on speech science and its application to speech technology.

Conference website: https://assta.org/sst-2024/

Keynote speakers:

  • Professor Marija Tabain, La Trobe University
  • Dr Rosey Billington, Australian National University
  • Associate Professor Sasha Calhoun, Victoria University of Wellington

Call for Papers: The SST conferences aim to encourage interdisciplinary research led by speech scientists, engineers, psycholinguists, audiologists, linguists, speech/language pathologists and industrial partners. We welcome submissions from all areas of speech science and technology.

Topics include but are not limited to acoustic phonetics, paralinguistics, applications of speech science and technology, audiology, computer-assisted language learning, corpus management, language acquisition in both first and second languages, forensic phonetics, hearing impairment studies, studies on languages of Australia and Asia-Pacific, low-resource languages, pedagogical technologies, sociophonetics, speech signal processing, speech pathology, perception and production of speech, speech prosody and emotional speech, speech synthesis and recognition, spoken language processing including translation and information retrieval, speaker and language recognition, spoken dialogue systems.

Details: https://assta.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/SST2024-2nd-call-for-papers.pdf

All accepted papers will be published in the Proceeding of SST2024. We accept 4-pagepapers for oral and poster presentations, and 1-page abstracts for poster presentation only.

We also invite proposals for tutorials, as 3-hour intensive instructional sessions to beheld on the first day of the conference. In addition, we welcome proposals for special sessions, as thematic groupings of papers exploring specific topics or challenges. Interdisciplinary special sessions are particularly encouraged.

SST2024 will incorporate SocioPhonAus as a special themed session, covering various aspects of work on sociophonetic variability in English spoken in Australia, New Zealand, and beyond. See the conference website for details.

Special session and tutorial proposals guidelines can be viewed here: https://assta.org/sst-2024/call-for-papers/

Important Dates:

  • Deadline for tutorial and special session proposals: 8 April 2024
  • Deadline for paper submissions: 10 June 2024
  • Notification of acceptance: 19 August 2024
  • Deadline for revised submission: 16 September 2024
  • Tutorial day: 2 December 2024
  • Conference: 3-5 December 2024

For any queries, contact the Organising Committee sst2024conf@gmail.com

We hope to see you at SST 2024 in Melbourne!

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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, Zhengdao Ye  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 Zhengdao an email (zhengdao.ye@anu.edu.au).

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/Membership/JoinMember. 

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