School of Languages and Linguistics - Research Publications

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    “And healthcare will be cured too”: transformations of winged phrases from Soviet films in modern Russian newspaper headings
    Kabiak, N (Sveučilište Jurja Dobrile u Puli / Juraj Dobrila University of Pula, Croatia Zagrebačka 30, 52100 Pula, Hrvatska, 2022-08-29)
    This paper examines the usage of “winged phrases” from Soviet cinema as they make their way from their place as film quotations into modern Russian – more specifically, into newspaper headings. The focus of this study is the process of the transformation of winged phrases in article headings within three contemporary Russian newspapers: “Комсомольская правда – Москва” (Komsomolʹs Truth – Moscow), “Известия” (News) and “Литературная газета” (Literary Gazette). The paper draws on analysis of 151 newspaper headings for the period from 1st January 2017 until 1st July 2018. An interpretation of transformed winged phrases embedded into newspaper headings is presented, drawing upon Lotman’s writings on cultural semiotics. It is argued that when winged phrases travel across time and across a “semiotic border” (Lotman) they undergo transformations from Soviet films into a contemporary context while retaining a dialogic connection with the past.
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    Prosodic phrasing, pitch range and word order variation in Murrinhpatha
    Fletcher, J ; Kidd, E ; Stoakes, H ; Nordlinger, R ; Rosey, B (ASSTA, 2022)
    Like many Indigenous Australian languages, Murrinhpatha has flexible word order with no apparent configurational syntax. We analyzed an experimental corpus of Murrinhpatha utterances for associations between different thematic role orders, intonational phrasing patterns and pitch downtrends. We found that initial constituents (Agents or Patients) tend to carry the highest pitch targets (HiF0), followed by patterns of downstep and declination. Sentence-final verbs always have lower Hif0 values than either initial or medial Agents or Patients. Thematic role order does not influence intonational patterns, with the results suggesting that Murrinhpatha has positional prosody, although final nominals can disrupt global pitch downtrends regardless of thematic role.
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    Stop (de)gemination in Veneto Italian: The role of durational correlates.
    Dian, A ; Hajek, J ; Fletcher, J ; Billington, R (Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association, 2022-12-16)
    This preliminary study investigates a long-assumed but previously untested degemination of stops in the regional variety of Italian spoken in the Veneto, in North-East Italy. The durational parameters known to be affected by gemination in Italian – i.e., consonant duration, duration of the preceding vowel and the ratio between the two – are considered. The entire Italian stop series is investigated through an acoustic-phonetic production experiment involving six speakers reading a set of carrier sentences designed to elicit different prosodic patterns. Partial degemination is observed for most speakers in terms of (a) decreased geminate-singleton consonant duration differences compared to previous studies on other Italian varieties, and (b) considerable overlap between geminate and singleton consonant-to-vowel duration ratio categories. Possible sociophonetic effects are discussed.
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    Designing an App for Pregnancy Care for a Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Community
    Smith, W ; Wadley, G ; Daly, JO ; Webb, M ; Hughson, J ; Hajek, J ; Parker, A ; Woodward-Kron, R ; Story, DA (The Association for Computing Machinery, 2017)
    We report a study to design and evaluate an app to support pregnancy information provided to women through an Australian health service. As part of a larger project to provide prenatal resources for culturally and linguistically diverse groups, this study focused on the design and reception of an app with the local Vietnamese community and health professionals of a particular hospital. Our study had three stages: an initial design workshop with the hospital; prototype design and development; prototype-based interviews with health professionals and focus groups with Vietnamese women. We explore how an app of this sort must be designed for a range of different use scenarios, considering its use by consumers with a multiplicity of differing viewpoints about its nature and purpose in relation to pregnancy care.
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    Крылатые выражения из советских кинофильмов как элементы национальной идентичности
    Kabiak, N (Издательство "Научный консультант", 2019)
    The paper is dedicated to the questions of the reflection of national identity in the headlines of newspapers Komsomol'skaya Pravda – Moscow, Izvestiya and Literaturnaya Gazeta for the period from 1st January 2017 until 1st July 2018, drawing upon examples of winged words adapted from Soviet films. Specific winged phrases considered uniquely reflective of Russian culture are highlighted. An attempt is made to explain the main reasons behind winged phrases transformations. The paper stresses the value of learning winged phrases from Soviet films in practical classes of Russian taught as a foreign language.
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    Building Speech Recognition Systems for Language Documentation: The CoEDL Endangered Language Pipeline and Inference System (ELPIS)
    Foley, B ; Arnold, J ; Coto-Solano, R ; Durantin, G ; Ellison, TM ; van Esch, D ; Heath, S ; Kratochvíl, F ; Maxwell-Smith, Z ; Nash, D ; Olsson, O ; Richards, M ; San, N ; Stoakes, H ; Thieberger, N ; Wiles, J (ISCA, 2018)
    Machine learning has revolutionized speech technologies for major world languages, but these technologies have generally not been available for the roughly 4,000 languages with populations of fewer than 10,000 speakers. This paper describes the development of ELPIS, a pipeline which language documentation workers with minimal computational experience can use to build their own speech recognition models, resulting in models being built for 16 languages from the Asia-Pacific region. ELPIS puts machine learning speech technologies within reach of people working with languages with scarce data, in a scalable way. This is impactful since it enables language communities to cross the digital divide, and speeds up language documentation. Complete automation of the process is not feasible for languages with small quantities of data and potentially large vocabularies. Hence our goal is not full automation, but rather to make a practical and effective workflow that integrates machine learning technologies.
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    Nasal aerodynamics and coarticulation in Bininj Kunwok: Smoothing Spline Analysis of Variance
    STOAKES, H ; Fletcher, J ; Butcher, AR ; Carignan, C ; Tyler, M (ASSTA, 2016-12-06)
    Nasal phonemes are well represented within the lexicon of BininjKunwok.1 Thisstudyexaminesintervocalic,wordmedial nasals and reports patterns of coarticulation using a Smooth- ing Spline Analysis of Variance (SSANOVA). This allows for detailed comparisons of peak nasal airflow across six female speakers of the language. Results show that in a VNV sequence there is very little anticipatory vowel nasalisation and greater carryover into a following vowel. The maximum peak nasal flow is delayed for coronals when compared to the onset of oral closure in the nasal, indicating a delayed velum opening gesture. The velar place of articulation is the exception to this pattern with some limited anticipatory nasalisation. The SSANOVA has shown to be an appropriate technique for quantifying these patterns and dynamic speech data in general.
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    The Pacific Expansion: Optimizing phonetic transcription of archival corpora
    Billington, R ; Stoakes, H ; Thieberger, N (ISCA-INT SPEECH COMMUNICATION ASSOC, 2021)
    For most of the world’s languages, detailed phonetic analyses across different aspects of the sound system do not exist, due in part to limitations in available speech data and tools for efficiently processing such data for low-resource languages. Archival language documentation collections offer opportunities to extend the scope and scale of phonetic research on low-resource languages, and developments in methods for automatic recognition and alignment of speech facilitate the preparation of phonetic corpora based on these collections. We present a case study applying speech modelling and forced alignment methods to narrative data for Nafsan, an Oceanic language of central Vanuatu. We examine the accuracy of the forced-aligned phonetic labelling based on limited speech data used in the modelling process, and compare acoustic and durational measures of 17,851 vowel tokens for 11 speakers with previous experimental phonetic data for Nafsan. Results point to the suitability of archival data for large-scale studies of phonetic variation in low-resource languages, and also suggest that this approach can feasibly be used as a starting point in expanding to phonetic comparisons across closely-related Oceanic languages.
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    Developing a workforce to support research reliant on data and compute
    Turpin, A ; Gruba, P ; Pozanenko, A ; Stupnikov, S ; Thalheim, B ; Mendez, E ; Kiselyova, N (CEUR, 2021-01-01)
    We describe the construction, operation and evaluation of the Melbourne Data Analytics Platform; a group of academics whose mission is to support research requiring non-trivial data analysis or compute at the University of Melbourne.
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    Developing global citizenship through real-world tasks – a virtual exchange between North American university students and Italian upper-secondary school students
    Trapè, R ; Hauck, M ; Muller-Hartmann, A (Research-publishing.net, 2020-11-30)
    This paper concerns a virtual exchange project between the University of Virginia (UVa), United States, and an upper-secondary school in Pavia, Italy. Centred on the question of gender equality, the project has been designed to take place over three years (2018–2021) with a direct reference to Robert O’Dowd’s transnational model of virtual exchange for global citizenship education, proposed in 2018. As an integrated part of the language learning curriculum, the project creates a virtual space which parallels the space-time of traditional class tuition, and which students can inhabit with a significant degree of autonomy. More specifically, this paper gives an account of how students, through real-world tasks, could develop global citizenship.