School of Languages and Linguistics - Research Publications
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ItemLD&C possibilities for the next decade(University of Hawaii Press, 2017)
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ItemNo Preview AvailableDeveloping a Somali Dictionary Application(Macalester College, 2014)New technologies offer access to unprecedented amounts of information and, while the equitable cost of access has been a major problem for distribution of this information, that is now changing. Mobile devices are getting cheaper so more people from a wider range of backgrounds and speaking a wider range of languages are using the internet. Support for the many small languages of the world has become a focus in the academic discipline of linguistics, and this includes developing a presence for these languages on the web and in mobile devices. This article discusses one such example, the Somali-English dictionary app, released in June 2014 by a Melbourne (Australia) team headed by the Somali artist Nadia Faragaab (NF).
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ItemWhat remains to be done: Exposing invisible collections in the other 7,000 languages and why it is a DH enterprise(Oxford University Press, 2017-06-01)For most of the world's 7,000 languages, there are few records available via the Internet. Recognizing this digital divide and the consequential underrepresentation of most languages in any linked open data efforts is a motivation for some solutions offered in this article. Efforts to increase the documentation of the world's small languages have led to the development of tools and repositories over the past decade. However, as not all digital language archives currently provide metadata in standard formats, their collections are invisible to aggregated searches. Other repositories (including many institutional repositories-national libraries and archives, mission archives, and so on) have language content that is not noted in the collection's catalog, so is impossible to locate at all via a search based on language names. Finally, there are collections still held by their creators and not in a repository at all, completely hidden from other potential users. This article suggests that it is a digital humanities project to make more information about the world's small languages more freely available, and identifies several means by which this could be accomplished, including a survey to locate more collections; a register to announce their existence; and a documentation index to provide an overview of what is known for each language.
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ItemMaking Meaning of Historical Papua New Guinea Recordings: Collaborations of Speaker Communities and the Archive(University of Edinburgh, 2019)PARADISEC’s PNG collections represent the great diversity in the regions and languages of PNG. In 2016 and 2017, in recognition of the value of PARADISEC’s collections, ANDS (the Australian National Data Service) provided funding for us to concentrate efforts on enhancing the metadata that describes our Papua New Guinea (PNG) collections, an effort designed to maximise the findability and useability of the language and music recordings preserved in the archive for both source communities and researchers. PARADISEC's subsequent engagement with PNG language experts has led to collaborations with members of speaker communities who are part of the PNG diaspora in Australia. In this paper, we show that making historical recordings more findable, accessible and better described can result in meaningful interactions with and responses to the data in source communities. The effects of empowering speaker communities in their relationships to archives can be far reaching – even inverting, or disrupting the power relationships that have resulted from the colonial histories in which archives are embedded.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableHabituality in four Oceanic languages of Melanesia(Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2019)Our knowledge about tense, aspect and modality (TMA) in the Oceanic languages of Melanesia has so far been severely limited by the lack of available data. Habituality in particular, as one of the less described TMA categories, has not yet been widely discussed for this group of languages. Based on corpus data and elicitations, we give a detailed overview of four languages, identifying common trends and addressing specific questions of general concern. These include the relation of habituality to (im)perfectivity and the relation between habituality and irrealis.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableLD&C possibilities for the next decade( 2017-01-01)
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ItemDocumentary Linguistics: Methodological Challenges and Innovatory Responses(OXFORD UNIV PRESS, 2016-02)
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ItemAssessing Annotated Corpora as Research Output(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2016)The increasing importance of language documentation as a paradigm in linguistic research means that many linguists now spend substantial amounts of time preparing digital corpora of language data for long-term access. Benefits of this development include: (i) making analyses accountable to the primary material on which they are based; (ii) providing future researchers with a body of linguistic material to analyse in ways not foreseen by the original collector of the data; and, equally importantly, (iii) acknowledging the responsibility of the linguist to create records that can be accessed by the speakers of the language and by their descendants.
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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.