School of Languages and Linguistics - Research Publications
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ItemIt's a word isn't it? Language affection as an outcome of language programmes.(School of Languages and Linguistics, 2000)Structural linguistics has a particular view of the integrity of language which may be detrimental to the construction of appropriate language maintenance programmes for small indigenous languages. In this paper I outline ways in which ‘affective’ use of language may be the most useful target of language programmes in some situations, based on my experience with Australian indigenous languages. Fluency in a language may not be the achievable outcome of a language course for a number of reasons, not least among them being the enormity of the task perceived by learners of the language. For languages with few or no speakers we should be able to construct language programmes in which the use of a small number of terms in the target language, for purposes of identity, is a sufficient and realistic outcome.
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ItemThe Aboriginal Studies Electronic Data Archive (ASEDA)(De Gruyter, 1995)
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ItemHandbooks of Aboriginal languages(Institute for Aboriginal Development, 1986)Handbooks of Australian Aboriginal languages have been or are currently being produced in various parts of the country. In this paper we wish to address some issues and problems we have encountered in compiling handbooks which may have wider theoretical import and practical applications.
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ItemLanguage maintenance: Why bother?(Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 1990-01-01)What do we mean by 'language maintenance'? It is an enterprise that, understandably, has the support of most linguists, but for what reasons, and to what possible outcome? There are at least seven arguments used in defence of the effort placed on 'maintaining' Australian Aboriginal languages, and these are discussed and evaluated in this paper. While each has merit, it is ultimately by appeal to morality and social justice that we find justification for Aboriginal language maintenance.
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ItemThe benefactive construction in South Efate(UNIV HAWAII PRESS, 2006-12)The benefactive construction in South Efate employs a prepositional phrase in the position immediately preceding the main verb. This position facilitates the expression of an additional participant in a sentence without competing for slots held by other participants (core arguments or adjuncts). Possessive morphology encoding the benefactive has been noted for other Oceanic languages, with distinct word-order marking a final stage of grammaticalization of the benefactive. While South Efate shares features with southern Vanuatu languages, it is shown that a preverbal benefactive is an areal feature of several languages to the north of South Efate, potentially supporting South Efate's position in the Central Vanuatu subgroup.
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ItemDocumentary linguistics and ethical issues(Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project, 2007)In recent years, there has been an increasing emphasis on documentary linguistics within our discipline. This change of emphasis has been motivated by our concern over the pace of language loss, and has been facilitated by coincidental technological changes. Within this developing field, and especially as a result of the technological resources now available, we suggest that new ethical challenges arise in the professional practice of the linguist. The issues which we wish to raise in this paper stand outside of the area covered by existing institutional ethics procedures. The practice of documentary linguistics has a greater impact in a community than traditional data collection practice. There are two aspects to this impact. Firstly, a good documentation attempts to record as wide a range of language events as possible, in many genres and in many settings. This implies that the researcher’s presence in the community will be more intrusive than if the sole aim is to record sufficient material to prepare a grammatical description. Secondly, the nature of the data captured is also more intrusive, with video recording common and high quality audio recording more or less standard. Language documentation also implies the existence of archival data, that is, high quality data which is intended for persistent storage, which is accompanied by metadata sufficient to allow for the discovery of the resource, and which is under the control of a third party. Both of these aspects of documentation raise ethical issues. What procedures are appropriate to obtain informed consent to the type of data collection discussed above? What sort of rights and responsibilities does an archive have as another interested party in the negotiation of agreements between researchers and speakers / communities? Given the technological possibilities for dissemination and reproduction, how can ownership rights in recorded material be handled? How far should communities’ concepts of ownership be taken into account? How can ownership and access rights be negotiated so that they hold over the time frame which archiving assumes? What may be the consequences for a community when material is returned to them by researchers or archivists, given that the research and archiving process will inevitably have changed the nature of the material and its status in the community? We suggest that it is time for linguists to engage with these issues. We will discuss who the interested parties are in these processes, what responsibilities and rights each party may have, and some of the areas of potential conflict between those rights and responsibilities