26/08/2024
ALS Newsletter #2 2024 (Special Issue – HDR News)
News from the University of New England (UNE)
(Some) PhD Students at UNE
UNE Linguistics academics are currently supervising around 20 PhD students, internal and external. Here is a small selection:
Testing mutual intelligibility between Namakura, Nakanamanga, Lelepa, South Efate and Eton.
PhD Student: Noémie Severin
Supervisors: Cindy Schneider (UNE), Charlotte Gooskens (University of Groningen)
My research project in Vanuatu focuses on five closely-related languages spoken within a dialect continuum: Namakura, Nakanamanga, Lelepa, South Efate, and Eton. Since the continuum blurs the lines between one variety and the next, I am investigating the relationship between these languages in terms of their degree of mutual intelligibility. Given the rich history and unique linguistic distribution of the region, extra-linguistic factors, such as exposure, are likely to play a role in mutual intelligibility. While intelligibility among European languages has been extensively studied, it is relatively unexplored in non-western contexts, with only one such study conducted in Vanuatu. My own quantitative study is quite experimental and requires participants to match pictures with words, stories, and songs. By closely examining both linguistic and extra-linguistic factors, my research aims to contribute to best practice in mutual intelligibility studies within a non-western context. This exploration will also fill a gap in our knowledge of these languages and their interrelationships.
Reduplication and Substrate influence in French-lexifier creoles
PhD Student: Christine Pejakovic
Supervisors: Jeff Siegel (UNE), Cindy Schneider (UNE), Sally Dixon (UNE)
Reduplication is a morphological process which occurs when a word or part thereof is repeated to form new words, giving rise to a range of semantic functions, e.g. mars ‘walk’ > mars-marse ‘stroll’/ ‘walk about aimlessly’ (Seychelles and Mauritian creoles). Using typological and descriptive analyses, this study aims to elucidate the form and function of reduplication in French creoles and ascertain whether these could be accounted for by the reduplicative features in their respective substrate languages. The languages under examination are the creoles spoken in Guadeloupe, French Guyana, Haiti, Mauritius, Reunion, Seychelles and New Caledonia, as well as their respective substrate languages. The latter consists of a range of languages that were spoken by (largely) servile populations of Africa, India and South America. With the exception of Tayo, spoken in New Caledonia, these creoles emerged in the context of colonization and slavery in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. According to the Superstratist school of thought of Creolistics, Creoles are considered to be purely descendants of superstrate languages - the language of the European ruling class. However, the fact that reduplication is particularly common in most African, Asian, Austronesian and creole languages and not Western European ones, is potentially indicative of substrate language influence. There has been very little research attention given to the French-lexifier creoles, as a group. As for their reduplicative processes, this would appear to be the first comprehensive comparative analysis.
The Spracherleben of Sandergemerisch speakers.
PhD Student: Janet Donnelly
Supervisors: Sally Dixon (UNE), Cindy Schneider (UNE)
While extensive research has been undertaken on dialect variation, more research is needed on the Spracherleben, the lived experience of language, of dialect speakers who live in multilingual contexts (Busch, 2017). This research was conducted in St Georgen im Schwarzwald, a town of 13,000 people in Baden-Württemberg. Many participants’ linguistic repertoires included a dialect called Sandergemerisch, Standard German, English and other languages. The research explored how participants thought about, felt about and experienced their linguistic repertoires and which language practices they used to maximise the range of people with whom they could interact. It also explored the influence of language policies and the social context on a smaller group of participants. The research utilised a mixed methods approach that included a survey which asked 143 residents about their linguistic repertoires and the spaces, activities, and emotions that they associated with the dialect. It also included language portraits workshops with six participants. The language portraits method involved participants colouring blank body silhouettes, to represent different ways of communicating. The participants then narrated their lived experiences of language, using their language portraits to explain their access to different parts of their linguistic repertoires and the motivations and circumstances that led to the development of various language practices, such as “mixed” languages (Busch, 2018). Such self-reflections by dialect speakers can make useful contributions to studies on the drivers of dialect levelling and dialect convergence.
Sally Dixon
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News from Charles Darwin University (CDU)
Annie Cameron is a final year PhD candidate at CDU’s Faculty of Arts and Society. Her research topic, Exploring sustainable collection management of community language archives to support language continuation, investigates how an Aboriginal community language archive supports language continuation within the communities that create and manage it. In the inquiry an analysis of language records from initial colonisation to the present recreates the ‘ambiences’ of records, the contexts of provenance. Archival material is compiled and analysed to reveal Aboriginal language workers and their languages, otherwise obscured through the scientific research process. Aboriginal stories, songs and history are interpreted as language records which circulate within the community and are captured during work with visiting researchers. The resulting documentary records are understood as a product of parallel provenance – the same records are generated with different purposes – for the research value to scientific linguistics, and for value as language and culture to Aboriginal communities. Aboriginal language records are created to support language continuity through a process of language work. Language work is language as praxis, conducted by Aboriginal language workers to sustain their languages. Language work is iterative, accumulative and occurs synchronously and diachronously. The relationships between language workers and events of language work guide archive access and use within Aboriginal kinship and governance. Over time, language continues in place, through its circulation between the archive and kinship in praxis as language work.
Tereza Hlavackova is a third-year PhD candidate at Charles Darwin University and works with the speakers of the Kunwinjku language in West Arnhem Land. Together, they try to understand the transmission of language and knowledge about food from Kunwinjku land. Their efforts build upon Kunwinjku pedagogies and aim to support the transmission to younger generations and people interested in Kunwinjku foodways.
James Bednall
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News from the University of New South Wales
Xiaoyu Zhao
Project title: A multidimensional investigation of cognitive load and performance
over time during simultaneous interpreting between English and Mandarin Chinese.This study investigates the impact of interpreting expertise and prolonged interpreting turns on simultaneous interpreting (SI) performance, focusing on court-specific factors. The study employs Cognitive Load Theory to explain the effects of input speed and source speech complexity. The findings highlight that cognitive load (CL) predicts SI performance, with high expertise reducing CL, while prolonged turns and increased input complexity exacerbate it. Recommendations for improving SI practice in domestic courts are provided.
Hang Cui
Project Title: A Sociological Approach to the Occupational Status of Court Interpreters in Australia
Court interpreters and their professional service are a crucial link in ensuring procedural fairness in the Australian legal system. Since the establishment of the National Accreditation Authority for Translators and Interpreters (NAATI) in 1977, court interpreting has been on a professionalization journey for the past four decades or so. Once a loosely organised field, court interpreting is now a relatively well-recognised occupation where most practitioners for major community languages are certified and adhere to a specific code of ethics. Despite this progress, court interpreters often report a low level of income, (APESMA, 2012; Hlavac, 2021) misconceptions of their work by the court (Hale, 2011), and inconsistent working conditions (Hale & Napier, 2016). Research also confirms a tendency of interpreters in Australia to leave the occupation due to a lack of respect and a relatively low occupational status (Department of Home Affairs, 2023; Ozolins, 2004). In response to these challenges, this PhD study is designed to understand and analyse the current occupational status of court interpreters working in Australia. Using both qualitative methods, such as interviews and observations, and quantitative questionnaires, this project seeks to 1) capture the lived experiences of court interpreters, and 2) listen to the voices of key stakeholders whose work influences and is also influenced by court interpreting. By doing so, this study will fill the gap in the current knowledge of interpreters’ status in the Australian setting and, hopefully, contribute to a dialogue between court interpreters and key stakeholders. The results are expected to contribute to the improvement of working conditions for court interpreters in Australia.
Mohammed Alkathiri
Project Title: Family language policy in a transnational context: A case study of Saudi families in Australia
This research explores FLP of transnational Saudi families in Australia by focusing on language beliefs, language practices, and language management as components of language policy (Spolsky, 2004). This research employs mixed methods design by utilising online surveys as quantitative instruments while qualitative instruments consist of multiple case studies that include semi-structured interviews with parents and children, and recordings of naturally-occurring conversations.
Hui Wang
Project Title: Language Maintenance and Shift in Ethnic Russian Families: A Transnational Study on the Russian Diaspora in China and Australia
The maintenance of heritage languages has become an increasingly important issue in today’s globalized world. Much research about heritage language maintenance and shift (HLMS) has been done in a fixed single community in Anglophone contexts, but little research has been conducted on documenting and exploring heritage language situations in the Chinese context. Even fewer studies have focused on heritage language speakers who have undergone multiple relocations beyond their initial country of migration, which is a feature of globalization that filled with massive mobile people with massive linguistic resources. This research project addresses such a unique context with a focus on Russian families living in China and those who moved on from China to Australia. Drawing on the integrated theoretical framework including the sociology of language, the social psychology of language, and linguistic anthropology, this project examines heritage Russian speakers’ language use, language attitudes, identity, motivations, and family language policies toward the complex ecology of Russian language, Putonghua, and English. The project utilizes a qualitative case study approach that involves several extended families, representing three generations across distinct geographical contexts. The findings inform current theories of language shift in minority contexts, particularly in understanding the dynamics of family language planning under changing circumstances. The project also provides insights for heritage language preservation and education, and serves as a reference for language policies which support heritage languages in different ways across different contexts.
Muhammad Iqwan Sanjani
Project title: Constructing Transnational Family Language Policy Through Translanguaging: The Roles of Family and School
Drawing on Li Wei’s notion of translanguaging space (TL space) (2011) and Spolsky’s family language policy (FLP) framework, this study investigates the roles of home and school in constructing translanguaging space among Indonesian transnational families in Australia. This study adopts an ecological approach to language policy which sees family as part of a wider ecosystem which constitutes institutions in micro, meso and macro domains. This ecological perspective views the construction of family’s multilingual practices and language policy as both public and intimate. This is because family’s private language practices at home are significantly shaped and mediated by cultures, values, discourses, and policies that exist in the meso (e.g., school, workplace) and macro contexts (national policy) in which families are part. The project's emphasis is on how schools influence the development of family translanguaging practices. This research collected data from recording of naturally occurring conversation, interviews, and diaries. Furthermore, interviews with teachers who teach the children of the recruited families were also conducted. Preliminary evidence suggests that translanguaging may serve as a means through which transnational families are fighting for epistemic inclusion in a context where monolingualism is prevalent and where their perspectives are often disregarded.
Zhefei Wang
Project title: Interpreting in migration and refugee review hearings at the Administrative Appeals Tribunal of Australia
This project is a mixed-methods research study on interpreting in Migration and Refugee review hearings at the Administrative Appeals Tribunal of Australia. It aims to identify the major interpreting-related issues in these hearings the following methods: a review of judicial decisions on interpreting-related appeal cases, an examination of the actual practice and challenges through observations of interpreted migration and refugee hearings and interviews with four groups of stakeholders, and two online surveys to ascertain the knowledge of interpreters and tribunal members on working together. This research study is significant in various ways. It will shed light on an under-researched interpreting setting in Australia, identify issues to be addressed in actual practice, and provide recommendations for working standards and training for tribunal members, administration staff and interpreters. It will inform macro- and micro-level interpreting studies in similar inquisitorial settings worldwide, and potentially contribute to research fields beyond interpreting studies such as migration law and forensic linguistics.
Muhammad Aminullah Hakiki
Project title: Translanguaging in Higher Education ELT Classrooms in Indonesia; Opportunities for Local Language Maintenance
My research investigates translanguaging practices in higher education ELT classrooms in Indonesia, aiming to explore how these practices foster language inclusivity and support the maintenance of local languages. By engaging institutional representatives, English language teachers, and students, I seek to gain comprehensive insights into the impact of translanguaging and its relationship with language policies.
Clair Hill
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News from Macquarie University
Caroline de Dear: Content-question words in Gija conversations
Supervised by Joe Blythe and Scott Barnes
This study uses interactional linguistic methods to examine how content-question words are used to perform three essential social practices in everyday Gija conversations (i.e., other-initiations of repair, requests for information, and word-searches). It uses 3 hours of conversational data to document and describe language use among elderly speakers of Gija, an endangered Australian language from Warmun, Western Australia. Everyday interactions in Warmun combine Gija and Kimberley Kriol, an English-lexified creole language. Gija is a fusional head-marking language with a relatively canonical gender system that extends agreement to content-question words. Kriol, however, does not contain grammatical gender. The study investigates the utility of Gija’s largely canonical gender system, and how it is used in a bilingual language ecology. Gender-inflected content-question words provide a salient resource for connecting turn components and tracking reference. In spates of bilingual Gija-Kriol talk, uninflected Gija content-question words signal a return to genderless Kriol antecedents or instances of zero reference.
Caroline de Dear working with Shirley Purdie (and Shirley’s great grand-daughter Lolana)
Tazin Abdullah: In Australia, women experience domestic violence (DV) at alarming rates, with emotional abuse reported most frequently. Women from LOTE (language other than English) backgrounds who also experience domestic abuse have greater difficulties accessing information and support. Against this background, my research investigates language barriers to accessing DV support services and understandings of emotional abuse in the form of coercive control (CC) in Australia’s linguistically and culturally diverse communities. This is timely due to the increasing criminalization of acts of coercive control as a prosecutable offence across Australian jurisdictions. My PhD is designed as a thesis by publication and will consist of three sub-projects related to: the accessibility of web-based institutional DV information; a survey of LOTE women in relation to online searches for DV and CC information; and a case study of DV and CC communications in the Bangladeshi community to provide a more nuanced perspective on this topic from a minoritized community. It is hoped that findings will lead to changes in communication policies that help deter DV and improve service provision for DV and CC victims from non-English-speaking backgrounds.
Anwar Alkhudidi: Children’s Development of the Arabic Emphatic Consonants; An Acoustic Investigation
Supervised by: Titia Benders, Katherine Demuth, Rebecca Holt and Tuende Szalay
The production of the articulatory complex emphatic consonants involves a primary coronal constriction and a secondary pharyngeal/uvular constriction. Acoustically, emphatics exert a strong anticipatory and carryover coarticulatory influence that can extend to all segments within the same word, a phenomenon termed ‘emphasis spread’. Prior research, primarily based on impressionistic data, suggests emphatic segments are typically late acquired, after the age of 4 years. However, auditory judgments may not fully capture the subtle developmental changes or gradations in the production of these consonants that are detectable through acoustic analysis. This thesis aims to acoustically examine the acquisition route of these complex emphatic consonants, focusing on both the consonantal and vocalic cues to the plain-emphatic contrast across different phonetic contexts. Specifically, this thesis acoustically examines the production of emphatic consonants across different word positions, initial, medial, and final, across three vocalic contexts, /aː/, /iː/, and /uː/, and whether the effect of the emphatic segment extends bidirectionally beyond the immediately adjacent vowel. Target consonants examined were the voiceless plain-emphatic obstruents /t/ vs. /tˤ/ and /s/ vs. /sˤ/. A single-word repetition task was used to elicit speech from 38 Saudi-Hijazi -Arabic-speaking children aged between 3;1 to 6;11, and 13 adults serving as reference data. The acoustic measurements taken were VOT of stops and F1 and F2 of adjacent vowels. Across these three studies, children demonstrate a non-linear developmental trajectory, initially showing a faster increase in the size of the plain-emphatic contrast with age, with the rate of this increase slowing down as children grow older. Furthermore, there is substantial alignment between child and adult production patterns concerning positional effects, vowel context effects, and emphasis spread patterns, highlighting the potential role of input on the development of emphatic consonants. Finally, female children produced, on average, larger contrasts than males. The findings of each study are discussed in relation to previous literature on emphatic production in adults, serving as a benchmark for understanding the developmental stages and strategies observed by children. References to various aspects of child phonology and production, including the cross-linguistic development of coarticulation, are also discussed.
Feng Xu: Cochlear implants (CIs) can help preschoolers with severe to profound hearing loss partly restore auditory function, promoting the development of speech prosody which plays a crucial role in communication, such as segmenting sentences into meaningful units (i.e., phrasing) and highlighting key information (i.e., focus). However, there are still challenges for preschoolers with CIs in acquiring prosody as some prosodic cues are severely attenuated due to the limited number of channels available for transmitting and decoding speech, especially pitch information. This pose a particular challenge for preschoolers with CIs speaking Mandarin, since Mandarin is a tonal language where prosodic cues, especially pitch, are essential for communicating lexical meaning via lexical tones. Consequently, Mandarin-speaking preschoolers with CIs might experience difficulties in acquiring and integrating prosodic cues for both lexical and post-lexical meanings simultaneously. The aim of my PhD project is to examine whether Mandarin-speaking preschoolers with CIs have acquired the use of prosodic cues in production and comprehension, specifically for phrasing to disambiguate meaningful units and express focus in an utterance. I have presented part of my research on Speech Prosody 2024, a biennial conference mainly focusing on prosody in language. I will also give a talk on the 49th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD 49) this year.
Dr. Margaret Ryan was awarded her PhD in June 2024 by the School of Psychological Sciences in the Faculty of Medicine, Health, and Human Sciences at Macquarie University, under the supervision of Linda Cupples, Iain Giblin, and Paul Sowman. Her primary research area is the role of syntax in meaning comprehension of written and spoken sentences by both skilled and disordered language users. Her thesis work investigates the neural reality of generative syntactic theory as we comprehend language in real time. She revealed that skilled-language users with varying linguistic backgrounds prefer a cause-to-effect event template to guide predictive processing of the unfolding sentence from its outset, but that they have to reanalyse late in the sentence if the predictions have been wrong—if they recognise the need to do so. She discovered that individuals differ in their comprehension styles, so some university undergraduates either do not recognise the need to reanalyse or run out of time to reanalyse before the next sentence starts in the rapid pace of auditory comprehension. She also discovered which aspects of the syntax and semantics of sentences make them more difficult. Many of her thesis conclusions are unique: uniquely testing the proposed causer thematic role; uniquely testing for subtypes and lability in experiencer-verbs; uniquely testing Distributed Morphology theory; uniquely reducing the thematic role set that is relevant for processing; uniquely testing aspect and event structure and their interplay with thematic roles; uniquely highlighting the unusual syntax of verbs of emotion despite their unexpectedly crucial role in decision-making; uniquely investigating the role of linguistic background in processing patterns, and uniquely suggesting implications for disordered language groups, individuals with hearing loss, and multilinguals; and uniquely employing a psycholinguistic methodology to explore these research questions. Margaret has published several papers and is currently working on a project with Dr. Titia Benders of the University of Amsterdam, investigating the link between the acquisition and production of weak syllables in children, and teaching in Linguistics and Psychology, particularly in research methods and statistics.
Brynn Quick: Rates of immigration to Australia have been increasing over the last twenty-five years, and more than 30% of current Australian residents were born overseas. With greater migration has come increased linguistic diversity, and nearly 1 in 4 Australian households now uses a language other than English. Against this background, this study investigates the processes of language service provision for linguistic minority patients in English-language Australian medical institutions. This overall research problem will be addressed through an institutional sociolinguistic ethnography investigating the relationship between the Australian language policies and guides around when a linguistic minority patient should receive access to language support and actual practices of multilingual service provision at a medical institution in the greater Sydney area. Data collection will involve policy audits, participant observation, and semi-structured interviews with healthcare receptionists and hospital admission teams. Findings will shed light on the ways in which language policy is operationalised in medical administrative processes, a crucial yet often overlooked component of a patient’s healthcare experience. Results may be used to inform language policies and procedures that can be easily integrated into both administrative teams’ and healthcare providers’ workflows in order to improve healthcare provision for linguistic minority patients.
Emily Pacheco (MRes candidate): Ninety percent of Deaf people have hearing children. These Children of Deaf adult(s) (Codas) have been minimally investigated in sociolinguistics research. Research has shown that children who interpret in migrant families participate in child language brokering (Orellana, 2009). This practice was applied to Codas and signed language brokering (SLB) emerged. These two concepts are interconnected for Codas with migrant parents. The (scoping) review conducted to explore studies on the heritage language maintenance (HLM) and SLB practices in migrant Deaf-hearing families revealed two sources discussing Deaf migrant parents’ observations of family language planning. The remaining 19 sources focused on HLM and SLB in Codas of non-migrant background. This reveals a gap that Codas with migrant parents are an overlooked population and further investigation is needed. To do this, two research questions will be explored: (1) What SLB experiences do hearing Codas of migrant Deaf parent(s) have? (2) Do the experiences of hearing Codas of migrant Deaf parents align with findings from HLM research? These questions will be answered through a sociodemographic survey and a semi-structured interview. Collected data will be analysed using thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) guided by the research questions. By investigating Codas in this context, the nature of their HLM and SLB practices can be better understood.
Anita Morrow, after working as an Audiologist in regional Queensland, Anita has returned to MQU to as a HDR student with the Aboriginal Children’s Hearing Health Program. Her PhD project will contribute to the work of the Aboriginal Children’s Hearing Health Program (ACHHP). ACHHP is a research team made up of Indigenous and non-indigenous researchers focused on improving care pathways for Indigenous children suffering from ear infections and associated hearing loss. Her research will explore what can be learnt from current best practice models and what innovations can be leveraged to improve systems of ear and hearing care in Australia.
Minh Nhut Nguyen (PhD candidate): Effects of task types on interlanguage variability in learners’ writing performance
Research on interlanguage (IL) variability has been a growing trend in the field of second language acquisition. From the existing literature, however, it appears that there has been no single study of IL variability involving three different written task types (descriptive, narrative, and argumentative), and very few studies providing cognitive accounts for IL variability from the learners’ perspective. Therefore, my PhD research aims to investigate IL variability in second language (L2) writing performance in terms of complexity, accuracy, and fluency across a range of divergent writing task types (descriptive, narrative, and argumentative). This study will recruit fifty-four participants who are users of English as a second language studying at institutions in Australia. A mixed-methods approach will be adopted, in which quantitative data will be gathered regarding IL variability across these three written task types, and qualitative data will be obtained to elicit learners’ cognitive processes via a semi-structured interview and post-task questionnaire. Drawing on Kellogg’s Writing Model, Skehan’s Limited Attention Capacity Model, and Robinson’s Cognition Hypothesis, the study seeks to deepen our understanding of the relationship between task types and interlanguage performance and the mediating effects of learners’ cognitive processes. It may also have pedagogical implications for understanding the complex relationships among task types, language output, planning conditions, and cognitive processes in task-based language teaching.
Joe Blythe
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News from the University of Western Australia
Madeleine Clews is currently in the final stages of writing up her PhD dissertation, with the working title A historical sociolinguistic analysis of 19th-century Australian English, with a particular focus on the Colony of Western Australia 1829-1900. In the spirit of the emerging field of historical sociolinguistics, Madeleine’s innovative multi-disciplinary approach examines small sets of written texts ‘from below’ in the detailed context of the colony’s socio-political settings and the individual speakers’ dispositions and relationships. To Madeleine’s knowledge, this is the first time that principles of microhistory—asking large questions in small spaces—have been applied to linguistic analysis in Australian English. This is a thesis by publication, with two works already published and a further three in advanced stages of preparation. Madeleine’s work has been greatly assisted by attending the well-timed 2024 Historical Sociolinguistics Network summer school in Cartagena, Spain, with the support of a 2024 ALS Susan Kaldor scholarship.
Lucía Fraiese is a mid-candidature PhD student in Linguistics at The University of Western Australia. Her research explores how First Nations teens use language to create, contest, and maintain bonds in the boarding school. She is interested in how individuals form social styles and social identities through language. In 2022-2023, she carried out a sociolinguistic ethnography at a majority First Nations boarding school in the Southwest of Western Australia, the home away from home for teens from various locations around Western Australia and the Northern Territory. Boarding at the school every term for 1-2 weeks at a time, Lucía engaged in participant observation with the students inhabiting the girls’ dorms, and joined in on any activity they were pursuing on breaktime and after school. These ranged from chatting about school and home, getting their nails or hair done, going for bush walks, to watching peers play sports. During these activities, students were invited to be audio-recorded in conversation with their peers and the researcher. The recordings collected make up the ‘Boarders’ Corpus of Australian Aboriginal English’, which consists of 42 hours of audio recorded data with 42 students. Lucía also observed students’ social organisation and their experience as boarders, and this was recorded in the form of fieldnotes, amounting to 162,779 words.
Alex Stephenson's PhD project investigates post-digitisation futures for the storage, management, dissemination, and potential usage of archival materials held by community-based language centres in Western Australia. As part of the Life After Digitisation ARC Linkage project, which seeks to digitise these cultural collections, Alex's PhD project engages collaboratively with four language centres across Western Australia to listen to and understand the perspectives, ideas, and opinions around the digitisation process itself, as well as the aspirations, expectations, risks, and benefits associated with digitised cultural and linguistic heritage collections. Alex is looking forward to travelling to the Kimberley in August and September 2024 to begin conducting interviews with the Mirima Dawang Woorlab-gerring Language and Culture Centre in Kununurra, and the Kimberley Language Resource Centre in Halls Creek. Alex is also working with Bundiyarra Irra Wangga Language Centre in Geraldton and Wangka Maya Pilbara Aboriginal Language Centre in Port Hedland.
Celeste Rodríguez Louro
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News from Griffith University
Alena Kazmaly's research introduces a new interdisciplinary subfield: the linguistics of personality. She demonstrates that personality research lacks linguistic analysis, leading to issues such as conceptual Anglocentrism in personality theories and difficulties in translating personality questionnaires. By applying lexical semantic analysis of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach, Alena examines a selection of personality adjectives in English and Russian. Her findings indicate that personality words have complex, culture-specific meanings, and highlight the need for caution when using them in cross-cultural research. Alena proposes using applied semantics to improve the wording of personality questionnaires to make them more easily translatable and applicable across different cultures. The thesis includes a collection of experimental questionnaire items, formulated in Clear Explicit Translatable Language (CETL). This work is intended to lay the groundwork for future collaborations with personality researchers and to advocate for the crucial role of linguistics in personality studies.
Stephanie Mašková: I am a PhD Candidate at Griffith University from Denmark researching contact-zone semantics in the postcolonial context of Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland). Since the Danish colonisation in 1721, the linguistic landscape in Kalaallit Nunaat has been shaped by contact between the Indigenous language Kalaallisut (Greenlandic) and the colonial language Danish. The Danish language has been imposed as a framework for understanding the Arctic, and the linguistic and extralinguistic circumstances have generated a separate framework of conceptual tools for understanding. By studying the cultural semantics of words that have emerged from the linguacultural contact in the Arctic setting of Kalaallit Nunaat, the thesis examines not only the contact between Inuit and Danes, Kalaallisut and Danish, but also the role of land in colonial contact.
Lisa Petersen is a HDR candidate at Griffith University whose PhD focuses on an analysis of phonological variation within an idiolect of Hawai‘i Sign Language (HSL). Her research project aims to contribute to the documentation and description of HSL, in alignment with the contemporary aims of language documentation and revitalisation. This involves thorough investigation, description, classification, and analysis of variation across the phonological parameters of HSL and possible contributing factors which influence this variation. She hopes her research will extend our understanding of phonology and typology in sign, and also across linguistic modalities, building a more representative picture of language generally.
Cliff Goddard
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News from RMIT Language Studies/Applied Linguistics
Budur Alsulami: The Saudi Arabia 2030 Strategy: Translation reception and translator readiness
My research aims to measure student readiness to be professional translators who can introduce and promote Saudi Arabia to non-Arabic-speaking tourists. To accomplish this, in the first stage of the project, twenty students from two Saudi Arabian Universities who have completed at least two years of Translation Studies were invited to translate two tourism texts of 300 words each. The texts contain information about famous tourist sights and traditional food in Saudi Arabia and contained cultural terms and heritage information. The students then completed a questionnaire about the challenges of the text and the process of their translation, and then participated in a semi-structured interview. In the second stage of the project, the students’ translations will be evaluated by a qualified NAATI examiner according to a NAATI rubric. Finally, these translations will be read by fifteen to twenty native and near-native readers of English, who will assess the quality of the translations based on their understanding of these texts. Results analysed to date suggest that a number of student translators faced challenges such as choosing the suitable translation method, omitting some key terms or words during the translation process, and had issues managing their time, all of which indicate a lack of practice in translating texts of this nature and lack of awareness regarding translation strategies.
Zichen Zhao: Female Images in the English Translations of Shui Hu Zhuan
My study aims to explore the female images in the English translations of Shui Hu Zhuan, a classical Chinese fictional work from the Jiajing period (1522-1567) in the Ming Dynasty, to explore how the translators have (re)constructed the negative portrayal of women in Chinese literature in different ways. Shui Hu Zhuan depicts an uprising led by Song Jiang during the late Northern Song Dynasty (960–1127). Notably, the portrayal of women in the novel are negative, showing a misogynistic tendency. There are four full English translations of Shui Hu Zhuan, conducted separately by Pearl S. Buck in the early 1930s, J. H. Jackson in the early 1960s, Sidney Shapiro from the late 1960s to 1980, and the father-son translation team John & Alex Dent-Young from 1994 to 2002. There are still many differences among these translations and between each translation and the original, reflecting varied (re)constructions of the female images. My study includes contextual research on the translators and their translations to find out what may have led to these (re)constructions. The analysis also incorporates theoretical frameworks in other disciplines such as feminism and post-colonialism to elucidate how these perspectives may inform the translators' practice and it is expected that their translations will be interpreted in the light of these theories in order to extend the depth of this study.
Edoardo Brunetti: 'Regional' languages of France: perspectives from the grassroots
My research focuses on the perspectives of speakers of three languages—Breton, Corsican and Occitan—looking at their experiences of learning and speaking a minority language, their hopes for the future of their languages, and what policy interventions they seek to aid language maintenance efforts. This research occurs in the context of significant declines in speaker numbers over the past 70 years, yet a cautiously growing level of government support—a significant shift from the historical suppression of regional languages by the state. A series of semi-structured interviews and online questionnaires are being conducted with members of these three linguistic communities, most of whom speak the languages and engage with them regularly as teachers, students, activists or writers. The interviews and questionnaires address themes such as language acquisition, transmission, opinions on language policies, views on the role of the state and other institutions, and language-based activism. In this pivotal moment for regional languages in France, my research seeks to provide an understanding of the perspectives of speaker communities, knowledge which is crucial for any language revitalisation efforts.
Kerry Mullan
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News from the University of Melbourne
Here are a selection of University of Melbourne Linguistics and Applied Linguistics PhD theses for the showcase.
Bulukia Abdullah (Luka): Reimagining Multilingualism and Superdiversity: Decolonizing Linguistics from A Global South Perspective in Accra, Ghana
Supervised by: Chloé Diskin-Holdaway; Giuseppe D’Orazzi; Gillian Wigglesworth
Luka just finished conducting his fieldwork in Accra, a highly diverse community in Ghana. His research aims to reimagine multilingualism in light of the persistent "coloniality of language," where, despite the presence of over 60 Indigenous languages in Ghana, English remains the primary mode of communication in all formal settings including schools. Using Indigenous approaches such as interviews, storytelling, and language portraits, his work explores how multilingual teachers, students, and parents of student in Accra navigate the pressures to conform to English, the dominant language, alongside their native languages. Luka’s thesis seeks to contribute to decolonial efforts by offering an alternative perspective on multilingualism. The primary objectives of this thesis are threefold: first, to decolonize linguistics; second, to provide an alternative perspective on multilingualism within a superdiverse country; and third, to amplify the voices of the Global South.
Katie Bicevskis: A grammatical description of Marri Ngarr (completed)
Supervised by: Rachel Nordlinger and John Mansfield
Katie Bicevskis completed her PhD project in August 2023. Her project was the documentation and description of Marri Ngarr, a critically endangered non-Pama-Nyungan language traditionally spoken in the Daly River region of the Northern Territory. Prior to the project, published linguistic research into Marri Ngarr was limited to a few topics in the grammar. Katie's project extended on the previous work and presented research into many aspects of the grammar for the first time. Marri Ngarr is a highly polysynthetic language and much of the thesis focusses on the complex verbal morphology which characterises the language. A substantial part of the project involved the collation and transcription of Marri Ngarr recordings which were made by various researchers over the last 50 years, particularly by Ian Green who spent several months working with Marri Ngarr speakers in the early 1990s. This collation and transcription work built the database for the PhD project, while also making these materials more accessible for future use through Paradisec. Katie conducted subsequent research with Marri Ngarr community members on fieldtrips to Wadeye. Katie is now working as a Research Associate at the School of Languages and Linguistics at the University of Melbourne and was this year's recipient of the ALS Jalwang scholarship to continue her work on Marri Ngarr. The scholarship will fund work on a Marri Ngarr dictionary written in collaboration with Marri Ngarr community members.
Kate Charlwood: Argument encoding and referential expression in Contemporary Tiwi (3rd year)
Supervised by: Rachel Nordlinger and Brett Baker
Kate is a third-year PhD candidate working on a description and analysis of argument encoding and referential expression in Contemporary Tiwi. Spoken on the Tiwi Islands in the Northern Territory, Tiwi has shifted considerably since it was last described by Osborne (1974) and Lee (1987). Kate is working with the Wangatunga Strong Women’s group as well as other members of Wurrumiyanga, Pirlangimpi, and Milikapiti communities to produce an updated documentation of the language. The thesis seeks to capture some of the variation in how verbs are expressed across generations, as well as how arguments are marked. This includes the emergent re-affixation of person markers on the verb (following the partial loss of Traditional Tiwi pronominal marking), the grammaticalisation of a dual series in the pronoun system, and new morphological ways of distinguishing arguments. The thesis also describes the development of an article system in the language, a relatively rare phenomenon for Indigenous Australian languages, as well as the use of double reference constructions in discourse. As such the thesis contributes to our understanding of Australian language typology as well as providing new insights on grammaticalisation pathways in Contemporary Tiwi.
Angelo Dian: The acoustic phonetic correlates of the long-short consonant contrast across three regional varieties of Italian (4th year)
Supervised by: John Hajek and Janet Fletcher
My name is Angelo Dian and I am a PhD candidate at SoLL. My research investigates cross-regional differences in the phonetic realisation of the consonant length contrast in Italian, exemplified by word pairs such as 'fato' (fate) vs. 'fatto' (fact). Italy's complex sociolinguistic landscape, shaped by its rich history, includes not only Italian, which has been the official national language for only about two centuries, but also numerous ‘dialects’, which are in fact sister languages of Italian genealogically. These dialects are spoken more frequently in some regions than others and influence regional pronunciation, leading to significant sociophonetic diversity. Although the consonant length contrast has been extensively researched phonetically for Italian, very few studies have considered this cross-regional variation. My research aims to fill this gap by providing and comparing acoustic data from three different regional varieties: 1) Roman Italian, a well-researched centro-southern variety whose pronunciation, particularly in its cultivated form, is considered relatively close to the idealised national ‘standard’; 2) Veneto Italian, an under-researched variety spoken in the northeast of the country, which has been claimed to reduce the consonant length contrast, or lack it altogether; and 3) Calabrian Italian, a southern variety with unique consonantal features, such as the aspiration of long /pp tt kk/.
Rena Gao: Interaction Matters: Automated scoring of interactional competence for second language spoken dialogues (3rd year)
Supervised by: Carsten Roever and Jey Han Lau
Rena’s research aims to propose effective evaluation metrics and evaluation framework in spoken dialogue to assess the interactive ability and to predict the ability of interactional competence for second language speakers. This study fills the previous gap in dialogue evaluation that fails to capture the nature of interaction and engagement in human conversations and helps large-scale language assessment to achieve a feasible method in auto scoring in speaking assessments.
Eleanor Jorgensen: The expression of time in signing varieties used in Hawai’I (2nd year)
Supervised by: Rebecca Defina
Eleanor is a second year PhD candidate based in the Language Documentation and Language and Cognition labs at the University of Melbourne. She works with members of the deaf community in Hawai’i to document their sign languages. Two different sign varieties have been noted in the Hawaiian context: American Sign Language (ASL) and Hawai’i Sign Language (HSL), the latter of which is now known only by the oldest generation of signers. Eleanor’s PhD project focuses on how older signers express temporal information, and how their negotiation of linguistic repertoire is informed by attitudes towards these signing varieties. This research aims to extend typological knowledge of sign language structures and language attitudes in a context of late-stage language shift, while being grounded in a pressing need to document an endangered sign variety (HSL).
Eleanor Kettle: Ensuring reliable transcription of poor-quality forensic audio featuring non-mainstream varieties of English (2nd year)
Supervised by: Helen Fraser; Olga Maxwell; Debbie Loakes
Eleanor Kettle is a PhD Candidate with the Research Hub for Language in Forensic Evidence at the University of Melbourne, and her research topic focuses on the role of the listener in the forensic transcription (FT) of poor-quality audio recordings featuring non-mainstream varieties of English (NMVE). The aim of this research is to understand which aspects of listener familiarity with NMVE are relevant, and how this may interact with listener aptitude for this task. The overall objective of this project is to ensure that any poor-quality forensic audio featuring NMVE which is used as evidence in a criminal trial is accompanied by a demonstrably reliable transcript, to minimise the potential for injustice.
Canaan Lan: Sound variation and change in Singapore English (3rd year)
Supervised by: Chloé Diskin-Holdaway and Olga Maxwell
My thesis investigates sound variation and change in Singapore English (SgE), focusing on two generations of Singaporeans born after English became the sole medium of instruction in schools. My fieldwork involved recording 24 participants reading wordlists, different kinds of reading passages, and engaging in casual conversation and a more formal interview. Current acoustic analyses show substantial similarity in pronunciation between several vowel pairs (e.g., the vowels in FLEECE and KIT, DRESS and TRAP, and GOOSE and FOOT) across the different types of recording. However, I have also discovered subtle differences that vary between speakers and specific words like bread or egg. My interviews also revealed diverse understandings among my participants of terms like Singlish and Singapore English, with younger generations showing a somewhat more positive attitude to Singlish and the role it plays in their identity as Singaporeans. This thesis aims to contribute to the growing body of work on SgE vowels and language use in multilingual postcolonial contexts.
Philippa Jane Mackey: The Little Things: Conversations between residential aged care workers and older people to build relationships and recruit cooperation
Supervised by: Carsten Roever
This study takes a discourse analytic approach to examine how Personal Care Assistants (PCAs) from non-native English-speaking backgrounds and older people (OPs) interact while engaged in daily care tasks in Australian residential aged care settings. Conversation analysis (CA) methodology is used to examine authentic interactions within an interactional sociolinguistics framework to ensure the microanalytic discourse analysis findings from the CA approach can be interpreted and understood in the context of the industry they came from. The study takes an appreciative enquiry approach to explore the strengths and successes of interactions that lead to the best outcomes. The data includes ethnographic observation, 29 interviews with PCAs and senior aged care staff and 49 audio recordings (total duration 08:42:00 hrs) of authentic interactions between PCAs and OPs during daily care activities. It finds that PCAs recruit the collaboration of the OP to perform tasks where both will benefit from the timely and efficient completion of tasks, and OPs recruit PCAs’ assistance with tasks the OP is the sole beneficiary of. Relational talk is extensively interwoven into these task-oriented interactions. Participants adjust the linguistic formulations of interactions that result in the recruitment of cooperation according to the pragmatic dimensions of the recipient’s demonstrated commitment to the nominated activity, the relationship of the nominated activity to the ongoing activity, the immediacy of the response required and the deontic authority of participants. PCAs maintain their stance of entitlement to recruit the OP’s collaboration according to these pragmatic dimensions, butmodify their transactional talk by orienting to the contingencies of the OP and incorporating relational talk to address the individuality and autonomy of the OP.
Peter Nyhuis: Lexical Representation in Wubuy
Supervised by: Brett Baker, Janet Fletcher, and John Mansfield.
Peter Nyhuis has successfully graduated from the PhD program at Melbourne with a thesis called 'Lexical representation in Wubuy'. Peter investigated the Australian Indigenous language Wubuy, which has a very complex word structure. Aspects of Wubuy word structure challenge current theories of language. Peter showed that these patterns can be analysed in a new framework of grammar called Relational Morphology, which has not previously been applied to languages of this kind. He also documented evidence of a sound change in progress, and presented the first analysis of intonation in the language. Peter is now working for the NT Dept of Education as a Regional Linguist.
Chloe Turner: The discourse function of noun incorporation in Wubuy
Supervised by: Brett Baker
Noun incorporation is a construction found in a variety of languages where a noun root is expressed as part of a complex verb rather than as the head of a noun phrase. While there has been a century long debate dating back to Sapir (1911) about whether noun incorporation is formed though lexical processes (Mithun, 1984, 1986) or syntactic ones (Baker, 1988, 2009), noun incorporation is commonly discussed as having a backgrounding effect (Heath, 1984, Chapter 14; Mithun, 1984, 1986). However despite these claims there has been little work examining the effect that information structure has on speaker's choice to incorporate a noun. Using a corpus of the Australian language Wubuy (also known as Nunggubuyu: Heath 1984) my aim is to carry out a quantitative analysis of the factors that influence the choice between incorporated and free paraphrases using referential choice methodologies such as those used by Kibrik (2011) and Schiborr (2023).
Tula Wynyard: Topics in Ritharrŋu-Wägilak grammar (3rd year)
Supervised by: Rachel Nordlinger and Brett Baker
Tula’s PhD thesis seeks to describe and analyse the grammatical features of Ritharrŋu-Wägilak, an endangered Indigenous language of Arnhem land. Tula is a third-year PhD candidate who has been documenting the language in collaboration with Ritharrŋu, Wägilak and Maḏarrpa community members, mostly in the Northern Territory communities of Ngukurr and Gapuwiyak. The language is closely related to Yolŋu Matha varieties such as Djambarrpuyŋu and attests many Pama-Nyungan language features, but speakers have also long been in geographic and social contact with speakers of non-Pama-Nyungan languages such as Ngandi, Wubuy, and Rembarrnga. These influences can be seen in the language in a number of interesting ways for linguistic investigation, such as complex predicate constructions and body part incorporation. Ritharrŋu-Wägilak has also developed agreement marking through pronominal clitics, which are found in complementary distribution with free pronominals; and has subordination constructions quite different from other languages in the region. These phenomena have been under-documented in the language, therefore this thesis will provide new data and insights towards understanding the grammar of Ritharrŋu-Wägilak.
Helen Fraser
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News from the Language and Communication Research Hub Centre for Indigenous Health Equity Research Central Queensland University
Dr Christoph Holz successfully completed his PhD thesis ‘A comprehensive grammar of Tiang’ in 2023. Tiang is an Oceanic language spoken by about 4000 people on Djaul Island in the northwest of New Ireland, Papua New Guinea. The present grammar is the first comprehensive description of the language. It is based on eight months of immersion fieldwork in the Tiang community and follows the framework of Basic Linguistic Theory. His PhD thesis has been chosen as the recipient of an Outstanding Thesis Award 2023 at CQU.
Marijke Bassani, a Research Officer at Jawun Research Centre, is working on Welcoming the Unwelcome: (Re)claiming space as the Black Indigenous Rainbow ‘Other’. Marieke commenced her PhD, 2018 (University of California, Berkeley, University of New South Wales, and CQU). Marijke is a Lamalama, Binthi Warra and Bulgun Warra gender and sexuality diverse woman raised on the sovereign lands of her people, the Guugu Yimithirr Nation, in the Cape York Peninsula of Far North Queensland. Marijke speaks Guugu Yimithirr as a first language, and South-east Cape York Creole as her second. Marijke is currently completing the final leg of a cross-border PhD in International Law under the supervision of UNSW Law & Justice and the UC Berkeley Center for Race & Gender where she was also the Visiting Scholar and Human Rights Lawyer in-residence for 2022 and 2023, and Jawun Research Centre (CQU). Through an intersectional Indigenous queer lens, Marijke’s qualitative empirical Cape York Peninsula-based research project explores the invisibility, and hypervisibility, of Cape York First Nations LGBTQIA+ Sistergirl and Brotherboy peoples within their communities, the wider dominant community and legal system (international & national). A key part of Marijke’s study has also involved exploring a demonstrated linguistic resistance to subscribe to existing English labels, categories, pronouns and terms used to define diverse gender and sexuality identities, and focuses on linguistic issues in Guugu Yimithirr, Creole, and English. This reluctance to subscribe by study participants often stemmed from a belief that such terms were imported and are culturally incompatible with existing understandings, languages, practices and traditions around gender and sexuality diversity in the Cape York Peninsula, making them disconnected from the lived experience of many Cape York First Nations LGBTQIA+ Sistergirl and Brotherboy peoples. This observation led to Marijke exploring the concept of linguistic assimilation within the context of gender and sexuality diverse English terminologies. Here it became clear that there was a need to cultivate space for study participants to Indigenise and decolonise their diverse genders and sexualities in ways that were more meaningful to, and in closer alignment with the cultural, social, historical, linguistic traditions and wisdoms of their communities. While self-determination and sovereignty over Indigenous lands are important, so too is self-determination and sovereignty over Indigenous bodies, genders and sexualities—particularly given land and body sovereignty are inextricably connected. Marijke’s PhD work has thus—for the first time in the Cape’s history—provided a platform for Cape York First Nations LGBTQIA+ Sistergirl and Brotherboy peoples to challenge their position as the invisible, and hypervisible, Black-Indigenous-Rainbow ‘Other’ on their stolen and colonised lands by allowing them to reclaim, and take up, space within their Cape York communities. A space where Indigenous gender and sexuality diversity is celebrated, rather than rejected; and Cape York First Nations LGBTQIA+ Sistergirl and Brotherboy peoples feel welcome on their lands and at home in their bodies as they stand proudly in the fullness of their rich vibrant cultural complexity.
Christie Mancktelow is a Proud Ngugi woman doing her Master of Research Thesis in the School of Health, Medical and Applied Science (CQU), on ‘Our Languages, Identity and Wellbeing; A Quandamooka Perspective’. The abstract of her thesis is as follows:
'Practising culture has been linked to positive health outcomes for First Nations’ Peoples. However, First Nations’ Peoples continue to experience poor health and wellbeing outcomes compared to non-Indigenous people. An important element of culture is language, and literature to date states our First Languages remain under threat. This study will explore the effect of Jandai and Gowar language use on the identity and wellbeing of the Ngugi, Nunukul and Goenpul Peoples from Quandamooka Country. The study will be underpinned by Standpoint Theory and an Indigenist research paradigm and will use a community based participatory approach. Following ethics approval, community and Elder yarning will occur to explore the underpinning research question: What are the effects of language on identity and wellbeing for Ngugi, Nunukul and Goenpul peoples from Quandamooka Country. The Yarns will lead to the co-creation of questions to explore through the virtual yarning platform. These methods fit with an exploratory multi-methods design. The study is largely qualitative; however, the virtual yarns will allow for a quantitative component. This research is expected to contribute to a significant research gap in Indigenous language use and its effects on identity and wellbeing. This research will also add to Indigenous-led research that uses Indigenous methodologies in language, identity, and wellbeing. Finally, the proposed research, depending on the results, may highlight the importance of language to closing the health gap for First Nations’ Peoples in Australia and could inform future policy and or policy changes that impact our languages.'
Alexandra (Sasha) Aikhenvald
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News from the ANU
Aditi Dubey’s research investigates language contact and change in Nagpur, India. Nagpuri varieties of Hindi and Marathi contain distinct structural features that have arisen through crosslinguistic influence that goes both ways, i.e. from Marathi to Hindi and Hindi to Marathi. Existing research on Nagpuri Hindi and Nagpuri Marathi is very limited and based on data collected several decades ago. In her doctoral research, Aditi provides a much more recent account of these varieties based on data collected from November to December 2023. Moreover, her research tackles the crucial, unanswered question of how the contact features in these varieties emerged. This is accomplished through a multi-layered approach that brings together observations from Nagpur’s history with important ideas from the subdisciplines of bilingualism, second language acquisition and sociohistorical linguistics, all united under the umbrella of contact linguistics.
Anneke Myers: My PhD analyses the evidence-taking practices of federal parliamentary committees when consulting Indigenous witnesses, especially those whose first language is not English. Such witnesses may not be in a position to ‘understand and be understood’ (Article 13.2, United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples) during parliamentary committee proceedings. This multidisciplinary project sources Indigenous expertise from the interpreting sector about culturally respectful ways for the parliament to work with interpreters and language speakers. Anneke is developing tailored, step-by-step advice for parliamentary committee officers whose job it is to contact, invite and support witnesses to appear before an inquiry. This advice is anchored in a collaboration with Aboriginal Interpreting WA (AIWA, pronounced 'ay-wa') since 2022, which includes interviews with AIWA interpreters. Anneke's ongoing thanks and appreciation goes to everyone from AIWA for sharing their expertise.
Emma Keith: My HDR project, which sits within the broader ARC-funded project Languages of Barrier Islands, Sumatra: Description, Typology and History, aims to write a descriptive grammar of Mentawai. Mentawai is a dialect continuum spoken on the Mentawai Islands in Indonesia; my grammar will focus in particular on the Sipora variety. There has so far been only scant documentation of the language varieties spoken on the Mentawai islands, which has left little for linguists to go on when determining how to classify them, both in terms of their relations to one another and to other nearby languages. As well as producing the grammar itself, my HDR project will, through the publication of collaborative research, position the subsequent grammar and its structural analysis within a broader contextual knowledge set surrounding the Mentawai varieties: their history; their genealogical classification; and their internal variation. The historical/genealogical side will endeavour to better understand the position of the Mentawai varieties within the Sumatran subfamily of Austronesian through the analysis of sound change and shared lexical innovations with neighbouring and related languages, enabled by the collection of a larger lexicon of Mentawai lexemes than has previously been available. From an internal variation standpoint, comparisons of lexical, phonological, and grammatical features from various fieldsites across the island chain will enable the classification and description of the variation between the dialects/varieties with a degree of certainty that has not previously been possible. These research strands, including that of the grammar writing process, will contribute to and be informed by the research done by other members of the ARC project on neighbouring languages throughout its progression, enabling a fuller understanding of the nature of the Barrier Island languages as a geographic and genealogical group.
Henry Leslie-O’Neill is a PhD student co-designing language learning materials for language revitalisation. After two years at the MDWg language centre in Kununurra, he and the Miriwoong team have designed a Kriol-medium learner’s guide to support Miriwoong adults learning Miriwoong. This might be the first ‘contact-language to traditional-language’ material of its kind (please get in touch at henry.leslie-oneill@anu.edu.au if you know of anything similar!). Through participant observation and talking story, Henry’s research investigates collective design processes in intercultural spaces such as language centres, and how learning materials can contribute to language revitalisation by connecting learners with language, country, community, and ancestors.
Huade Huang was awarded his PhD in July 2024 for his thesis ‘A Grammar of Kua’nsi’. Based on a large multimedia corpus of spontaneous speech recorded in extensive fieldwork, the thesis provides the first comprehensive description of various aspects of Kua’nsi, a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Yunnan province in southwestern China. The research is a first step to revealing the linguistic history of the local Ngwi groups and it contributes to the understanding of linguistic diversity and the patterns of multilingualism in the region which is unknown until recent years.
James Gray: in my dissertation Topics in Pintupi-Luritja syntax and semantics, I investigate the extent to which certain semantic distinctions are encoded syntactically in Pintupi-Luritja, a Western Desert language spoken in Central Australia. Languages of that region have generally been analysed as non-configurational, whereby word order has been noted to be very free and does not determine particular semantic readings. I consider the link between syntactic structure and semantics in the realms of negation, association with focus, modality, as well as how these elements interact with each other in Pintupi-Luritja. I show that syntax does play a role to differing degrees for these phenomena, which suggests that the investigation of the syntax-semantics interface in Australian languages should take phenomena such as these into account.
Janet Davey is a PhD candidate in the School of Literature, Languages & Linguistics and the Australian Centre on China in the World at the Australian National University. Janet’s research explores the boundaries of the chengyu category as understood by ordinary native Chinese speakers. Although Chinese idiomatic expressions, known as chengyu 成语, have been integral to Chinese linguaculture for over two millennia, few scholars have paused to question: what actually are chengyu? In this mixed-methods study, Janet analyses native speaker ratings, questionnaire responses, and acceptability judgements from 250 Chinese speakers to identify factors that impart perceived “chengyu-ness" to four-character expressions, and examine how chengyu intuition is shaped by language, cultural and educational backgrounds. By describing chengyu from the perspective of ordinary speakers, this research provides insight into the conceptualisation of an enduring phraseological category and its significance for language pedagogy and cultural literacy.
Laura Chien is a PhD candidate and Research Assistant at the Institute for Communication in Health Care at the Australian National University. Laura's research investigates the communication of diagnostic uncertainty in emergency care from the perspective of patients and caregivers experiencing real-world diagnostic uncertainty. Her research aims to shed light on patient and caregiver expectations about diagnosis and the communication of uncertainty, as well as how patients and caregivers communicate about uncertainty as they navigate their diagnostic journey. Improved understanding of how patients and caregivers experience and communicate about diagnostic uncertainty has the potential to enhance patient safety in the high-stakes ED environment.
Shubo Li's PhD project investigates the sound system of Nakanamanga, an Oceanic language of Vanuatu. Nakanamanga is spoken on various islands from northern Efate to Tongoa, by approximately 10,000 people. Nakanamanga is one of the languages of Vanuatu with the most speakers, but it has not yet been the subject of detailed linguistic research beyond a grammatical description based on data collected with one speaker (Schütz, 1969), and many unresolved matters remain, especially regarding the sound system. This PhD project aims to produce a phonetically informed phonological analysis of Nakanamanga, focusing on segmental and prosodic characteristics, including proposed quality and length contrasts among the vowels, place and voicing distinctions among the consonants, especially in the coronal space, and word level prominence. A range of types of speech data will be collected with different Nakanamanga communities. The close investigation of the Nakanamanga sound system will significantly improve description of the language, contribute to crosslinguistic work on phonetic and phonological typology, and inform understandings of language variation and change in central Vanuatu.
Saurabh Nath: My doctoral project is a corpus dialectology study on Assamese. It incorporates ideas and insights from both traditional and modern dialectology (including dialectometry) and draws upon methods from corpus linguistics, variationist sociolinguistics, socio-phonetics, and historical linguistics. Assamese is the easternmost Indo-Aryan language, primarily spoken in the Brahmaputra valley of Assam in northeastern India. The region is a linguistic hotspot, accommodating hundreds of languages from four language families: Indo-Aryan, Tibeto-Burman, Tai-Kadai, and Austro-Asiatic, with Assamese serving as the lingua franca among them. This complex language ecology makes the study of Assamese both challenging and intriguing, as the languages with which Assamese has been in contact vary from region to region, potentially leading to regional variations resulting from long-term contact. In the absence of a systematic speech corpus of Assamese, the project first aims to create a contemporary speech corpus of Assamese representing all major regional dialects. Secondly, it aims to develop deeper insights into the phonetics and phonology of vowels and their regional variation using the speech corpus. The utility of this speech corpus extends beyond vowel studies; it could also be instrumental in addressing various other linguistic and sociolinguistic questions in subsequent research.
Zhengdao Ye and Wayan Arka
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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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