School of Languages and Linguistics - Research Publications
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ItemMultilingualism in Cyberspace - Longevity for Documentation of Small Languages(Interregional Library Cooperation Centre, 2012)
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ItemWorking Together in Vanuatu: Research Histories, Collaborations, Projects and Reflections(ANU Press, 2011-10-01)This collection is derived from a conference held at the Vanuatu National Museum and Cultural Centre (VCC) that brought together a large gathering of foreign and indigenous researchers to discuss diverse perspectives relating to the unique program of social, political and historical research and management that has been fostered in that island nation. While not diminishing the importance of individual or sole-authored methodologies, project-centered collaborative approaches have today become a defining characteristic of Vanuatu’s unique research environment. As this volume attests, this environment has included a dynamically wide range of both ni-Vanuatu and foreign researchers and related research perspectives, most centrally including archaeologists and anthropologists, linguists, historians, legal studies scholars and development practitioners. This emphasis on collaboration has emerged from an ongoing awareness across Vanuatu’s research community of the need for trained researchers to engage directly with pressing social and ethical concerns, and out of the proven fact that it is not just from the outcomes of research that communities or individuals may be empowered, but also through their modes and processes of implementation, as through the ongoing strength and value of the relationships they produce. With this in mind, the papers presented here go beyond the mere celebration of collaboration by demonstrating Vanuatu’s specific environment of cross-cultural research as a diffuse set of historically emergent methodological approaches, and by showing how these work in actual practice.
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ItemKeeping records of language diversity in Melanesia: The Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC)(University of Hawaii Press, 2012)At the turn of this century, a group of Australian linguistic and musicological researchers recognised that a number of small collections of unique and often irreplaceable field recordings mainly from the Melanesian and broader Pacific regions were not being properly housed and that there was no institution in the region with the capacity to take responsibility for them. The recordings were not held in appropriate conditions and so were deteriorating and in need of digitisation. Further, there was no catalog of their contents or their location so their existence was only known to a few people, typically colleagues of the collector. These practitioners designed the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC), a digital archive based on internationally accepted standards (Dublin Core/Open Archives Initiative metadata, International Association of Sound Archives audio standards and so on) and obtained funding to build an audio digitisation suite in 2003. This is a new conception of a data repository, built into workflows and research methods of particular disciplines, respecting domain-specific ethical concerns and research priorities, but recognising the need to adhere to broader international standards. This paper outlines the way in which researchers involved in documenting languages of Melanesia can use PARADISEC to make valuable recordings available both to the research community and to the source communities.
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ItemEndangered Languages in Australia(Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2013)Abstract Australia has the dubious reputation of being home to many of the world's most endangered languages, and having been the home of many indigenous languages that are no longer spoken.
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ItemMood and Transitivity in South Efate(UNIV HAWAII PRESS, 2012-12)South Efate, an Oceanic language of central Vanuatu, allows the expression of temporal relations in several ways using markers of aspect and mood. Pronominal expression of arguments is obligatory and, as subject proclitics occur in one of three forms (realis, irrealis, and perfect), expression of aspect or mood is required in every sentence. South Efate is one of a group of Vanuatu languages that displays stem-initial mutation, whereby the initial consonant of a very small group of verbs changes to reflect mood. This paper presents evidence that fortis (realis) and lenis (irrealis) stem mutation also correlates with features of transitivity, not a surprising finding following the work of Hopper and Thompson. All else being equal, the fortis form of the verb occurs in clauses that have an overt expression of an object, while the lenis form occurs when there is no object in the clause. A further curiosity is that stem-initial mutation has been maintained for just a small class of verbs, so its correlation with transitivity in just this small class is all the more interesting. This paper explores the relationship between the morphological expression of mood and transitivity in South Efate, and suggests frequency of use as an explanation for the retention of this marginal system that affects only 7 percent of verb stems in the lexicon.
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ItemLinguistic Data Management(Oxford University Press, 2012-09-18)
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ItemNo Preview AvailableCuration of Oral Tradition from Legacy Recordings: An Australian Example(Project MUSE, 2013-10)Hundreds of hours of ethnographic field recordings and their associated oral tradition were destined to be lost until the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC, http://paradisec.org.au) was established in 2003 to digitize and curate this legacy made by Australian academic researchers since the 1960s (Barwick and Thieberger 2006; Thieberger and Barwick 2012).1 These recordings in the languages of the region around Australia (broadly speaking, an area that includes Indonesia, Papua New Guinea [PNG], and the Pacific Islands) have high cultural value and are often the only records in these languages. Many languages in this region are spoken by few people and are in danger of being lost because of the pressure from neighboring languages or metropolitan languages such as Indonesian, Tok Pisin, English, or French, and so the records made a generation or more ago become all the more valuable. However, despite their unique heritage value, these recordings were not eligible to be preserved or curated by any existing Australian collecting institution. A group of linguists and musicologists planned PARADISEC and sought advice from relevant agencies (in particular from the National Library of Australia and the National Film and Sound Archive). This advice was particularly valuable in allowing us to determine appropriate metadata standards (we use Dublin Core and Open Archives Initiative metadata terms as a subset of our catalog’s metadata) and to understand the more hands-on requirements of cleaning and repairing moldy or damaged analog tapes. We then applied for and received infrastructure funding from the Australian Research Council. With a grant that was to last for just one year, we had to build a successful archive prototype that could then attract further funds.
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ItemCybraries in paradise: New technologies and ethnographic repositories(Routledge, 2013-01-01)Digital technologies have altered research practices surrounding creation and use of ethnographic field recordings, and the methodologies and paradigms of the disciplines centered around their interpretation. In this chapter we discuss some examples of our current research practices as fieldworkers documenting music and language in the Asia-Pacific region in active engagement with the cultural heritage communities, and as developers and curators of the digital repository PARADISEC (the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures: ). We suggest a number of benefits that the use of digital technologies can bring to the recording of material from small and endangered cultures, and to its re-use by communities and researchers.
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ItemExtinction in whose terms? which parts of a language constitute a target for language maintenance programmes?(RoutledgeCurzon, 2013-01-01)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. 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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ItemSharing data in small and endangered languages: Cataloging and metadata, formats, and encodings(John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2010-11-25)