School of Languages and Linguistics - Research Publications
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ItemTowards a Web search service for minority language communities(State Library of Victoria, 2006)Locating resources of interest on the web in the general case is at best a low precision activity owing to the large number of pages on the web (for example, Google covers more than 8 billion web pages). As language communities (at all points on the spectrum) increasingly self-publish materials on the web, so interested users are beginning to search for them in the same way that they search for general internet resources, using broad coverage search engines with typically simple queries. Given that language resources are in a minority case on the web in general, finding relevant materials for low density or lesser used languages on the web is in general an increasingly inefficient exercise even for experienced searchers. Furthermore, the inconsistent coverage of web content between search engines serves to complicate matters even more. A number of previous research efforts have focused on using web data to create language corpora, mine linguistic data, building language ontologies, create thesaurii etc. The work reported in this paper contrasts with previous research in that it is not specifically oriented towards creation of language resources from web data directly, but rather, increasing the likelihood that end users searching for resources in minority languages will actually find useful results from web searches. Similarly, it differs from earlier work by virtue of its focus on search optimization directly, rather than as a component of a larger process (other researchers use the seed URIs discovered via the mechanism described in this paper in their own varied work). The work here can be seen to contribute to a user-centric agenda for locating language resources for lesser-used languages on the web. (From Introduction)
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ItemExotisme et couleur locale – essai d’une analyse constrastive des champs sémantiques respectifs( 2003)La terminologie littéraire et le discours critique contemporains dans le domaine français semblent reléguer d’une façon presque unanime et irrévocable le syntagme couleur locale parmi les expressions désuètes appartenant au discours littéraire « pré-théorique ». En revanche, les deux décennies passées ont témoigné d’un renouveau d’intérêt pour l’exotisme littéraire, devenu l’objet de nombreux travaux d’érudition, thèses universitaires et colloques. S’agirait-it d’une simple expansion du champ de l’exotisme au détriment du terme évincé, jugé trop démodé ?Cet article, présentant les résultats d’une thèse toujours en chantier, se propose d’établir le rapport et le degré de parenté entre ces deux termes voisins en démontrant que le transfert sémantique en question est loin de s’arrêter à une simple question d’appellation.En analysant les définitions lexicographiques et celles proposées par des ouvrages d’érudition importants ainsi que les différentes occurrences des deux termes, nous tenterons de démontrer les différences existant entre leurs acceptions originales respectives et d’esquisser dans une perspective diachronique les voies d’évolution sémantique qui ont pu favoriser leur contamination mutuelle, aboutissant à l’élimination d’un des termes jugé superflu du système terminologique actuel. Ce faisant nous essaierons d’expliquer les raisons pour lesquelles le terme couleur locale était souvent doté d’une connotation péjorative au cours de sa longue évolution sémantique en examinant son pertinence dans un système terminologique contemporain.Finalement, nous examinerons les problèmes que la définition de la couleur locale pose, surtout sur le plan international, en raison des contaminations des champs sémantiques de ses équivalents linguistiques par ceux des termes dénotant les courants apparentés des traditions nationales dans plus d’une aire linguistique (loca
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ItemNo Preview AvailableSustainable data from digital fieldwork: from creation to archive and back(Sydney Unversity Press, 2006)This collection of papers arises from a conference of the same name, held at the University of Sydney in December 2006. Funded jointly by the Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories and the Ethnographic e-Research project, and hosted by PARADISEC (the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures), the conference brought together researchers, technologists and information specialists with a common interest in sharing the results of their recent work at the interface between fieldwork and digital repositories. The timeliness of this event is indicated by the considerable national and international interest generated by the conference, which attracted presenters and attendees from the USA, Canada, UK, Norway and Russia, as well as staff and students of Australian Universities, national cultural institutions and Indigenous cultural centres. A selection of papers offered to the conference were submitted for anonymous peer review to form this volume.
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ItemEOPAS, the EthnoER online representation of interlinear text(University of Sydney, 2006)One of the goals of the Australian Research Council-funded E-research project called Sharing access and analytical tools for ethnographic digital media using high speed networks, or simply EthnoER, is to take outputs of normal linguistic analytical processes and present them online in a system we have called the EthnoER online presentation and annotation system, or EOPAS. EthnoER has twenty-three chief investigators from ten organisations, both Australian and international, at Universities and other agencies, including the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), language centres and language archives. The project includes a set of testbed projects with varying requirements for online annotation and presentation of data. We aim to provide online mechanisms for annotating data in order that, for example, archival media files can be annotated by experts with local knowledge and that samples of that media, perhaps a three minute chunk, can be presented so that users can get a sense of the quality of the recording and other information that may influence their decision to download the whole file.
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ItemApposition as coordination: evidence from Australian languages(CSLI Publications, 2006)Using data from a range of Australian languages, in this paper we argue for an analysis of various nominal appositional structures as syntactic coordinations (i.e. as hybrid f-structures) in LFG. We show that this provides a simple and straightforward account of the surface syntactic similarities among a range of juxtaposed construction types, while the differences between the constructions can be accounted for in the mapping to the semantics. We propose meaning constructors to capture the semantic differences between coordination and apposition.
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ItemProsodic phonology and raddoppiamento sintattico: a re-evaluation( 2006)The phenomenon known as raddoppiamento sintattico (RS) in Italian has been used to justify the notion of the phonological phrase in prosodic phonology. However, careful consideration of the application of the theory itself as well as a number of empirical problems raised by other scholars do not support the notion that the phonological phrase is useful in describing RS.
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ItemRaddoppiamento sintattico and glottalization phenomena in Italian: a first phonetic excursus( 2002)This study is a preliminary phonetic exploration of aspects of the well-known Italian sandhi phenomenon of Raddoppiamento sintattico (henceforth RS), which involves the gemination of word-initial consonants under certain conditions, eg dei [k]ani ‘some dogs’ but tre [kk]ani ‘three dogs’. It is often assumed that RS C-gemination is regular, but there is increasing evidence that it competes with other phenomena such as vowel lengthening. This study first discusses results of our auditory study of RS contexts, which show that RS is far less frequent in spontaneous speech than is theoretically predicted. This paper then looks specifically at glottal stop insertion and creak in RS contexts, based on the results of an initial small-scale acoustic investigation. The first has controversially been reported as occurring in RS environments where it serves to block RS (Absalom & Hajek, 1997). In addition, glottal stops have also been claimed to provide a coda to short word-final stressed vowels outside of RS environments (Vayra, 1994). We discuss our unexpected finding that glottalization characterizes phrase boundaries in our spontaneous speech data, and the implications that this evidence may have for the phonetic and phonological description of Italian and for our understanding of RS.
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ItemLanguages and culture in Australia in the 21st century: riding the multilingual tiger(Canberra: Department of Education, Science and Training, 2001)The rise of English as the world's dominant world language is seen by many as inevitable and permanent. While it might seem to bestow great advantage on native English-speakers, such an outcome is not guaranteed today or over time. It also runs the risk of disadvantaging English-speakers who are less inclined to see and grasp the benefits of multilingualism. History shows linguisitc predominance not to be permanent and there are compelling reasons - economic amongst them - in ensuring Australians are fluent in more than just English.
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ItemPhonological length and phonetic duration in Bolognese: are they related?( 1994)The phonetic basis of a reported phonological correlation between stressed vowel and post-tonic consonant length in Bolognese (Italo-Romance, N. Italy) is examined for the first time. Whilst a vowel length distinction is confirmed for all subjects, a correlation between vowel and consonant duration is not universal.
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ItemEtgar Keret's Travelling Heroes( 2006)Israeli writer Etgar Keret often tells of his own travels or those of other Israeli characters in his short stories. I argue that a deeper reading of this aspect of Hebrew literature reveals a national state of dislocation. A further comparison between Keret and S Y Abramovich, better known as Mendele the Book Peddler (Mendele Mocher Sfarim) reveals an anti-national thread running through Hebrew fiction.