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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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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ItemSharing data in small and endangered languages: Cataloging and metadata, formats, and encodings(John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2010-11-25)
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ItemBUILDING A LEXICAL DATABASE WITH MULTIPLE OUTPUTS: EXAMPLES FROM LEGACY DATA AND FROM MULTIMODAL FIELDWORK(OXFORD UNIV PRESS, 2011-12)The creation of reusable lexical database files, based in fieldwork or arising from historical research, benefits from conformance to established standards which then greatly increases the enduring usability of the lexicon, and its later ability to link to external objects, including media. All linguistic analysis benefits from the close relationship between primary recordings and a textual corpus, but a dictionary can also benefit from links to media in the use of playable example sentences and citation forms of headwords. In this paper several examples will be used to illustrate that not all linguists want to deal with the tools required to take advantage of these methods, so, in some cases, they are better off seeking advice and assistance in advance of building the database or in its later conversion to output formats.
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ItemA South Efate dictionary( 2011)This dictionary has been the product of collaborative work with a number of speakers of the language of South Efate. It is part of an ongoing project that includes the recording of stories in the language, a selection from which is produced as ‘Natrauswen nig Efat’.
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ItemNatrauswen nig Efat: stories from South Efate( 2011)This book presents a selection of stories recorded mainly in Erakor village, Efate, Vanuatu since the mid-1990s. This collection of stories is a result of my collaboration with a number of Erakor villagers. The stories presented here are not and could not claim to be a comprehensive view of Erakor tradition. Each is the result of the speaker’s choice of what they would tell me and reflects their understanding of what is significant, based on my request for them to talk about any topic, but largely framed by kastom (traditional) story, history or personal story. These are the categories into which I have placed the stories. This distinction is not unproblematic as personal stories can become indistinguishable from kastom stories when magical events intervene in the narrator’s life, and can also reflect historical events in which the narrator inevitably finds themself. The collection presented here aims primarily to provide a record of aspects of Erakor life for South Efate speakers and for interested outsiders. Given that little else is published about this village the present set of stories is a first step, one that I hope will be followed up with more collaboration from Erakor villagers.