School of Languages and Linguistics - Research Publications
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ItemHypothetically Speaking: Ethics in linguistic fieldwork, a provocation(Routledge, 2023-03-06)Ethical issues are not always easily resolved. In the case of language documentation work, such issues require careful thought to ensure that all parties to a research process are informed and are able to participate equally, or to the level that they want, in the research process. While there is a considerable literature on ethics and fieldwork, here we present some of the issues in the form of an entertaining hypothetical discussion, presented as part of the social program at a conference of the Australian Linguistic Society with a cast who were given an outline of their roles, but not the scenarios that they would have to address in the course of the event. At the request of cast members, and in keeping with the topic, we did not record the presentation, but do offer the script here in the hope that it provides a less didactic coverage of some ethical issues than may be found elsewhere. We are pleased to be able to offer this chapter in celebration of Nick Ostler’s career and of his support for many language projects around the world. We hope this chapter’s entertainment can live up to Nick’s entertaining conversation in conference presentations and dinners.
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ItemCommunity-Led Documentation of Nafsan (Erakor, Vanuatu)(SPRINGER INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHING AG, 2022-01-01)We focus on a collaboration between community members and visiting linguists in Erakor, Vanuatu, aiming to build the capacity of community-based researchers to undertake and sustain documentation of Nafsan, the local indigenous language. We focus on the technical and procedural skills required to collect, manage, and work with audio and video data, and give an overview of the outcomes of a community-led documentation after initial training. We discuss the benefits and challenges of this type of project from the perspective of the community researchers and the external linguists. We show that community-led documentation such as this project in Erakor, in which data management and archiving are incorporated into the documentation process, has crucial benefits for both the community and the linguists. The two most salient benefits are: a) long-term documentation of linguistic and cultural practices calibrated towards community’s needs, and b) collection of larger quantities of data by community members, and often of better quality and scope than those collected by visiting linguists, which, besides being readily available for research, have a great potential for training and testing emerging language technologies for less-resourced languages, such as Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR).
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ItemRodolfo Kusch: La Negación Como Apertura y Desprendimiento.(Universidad de La Serena; Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, 2022)
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ItemNo Preview AvailableCarl Georg von Brandenstein’s legacy: The past in the present(ANU Press, 2017-09-21)Interned as a prisoner of war in Australia in the 1940s, the Hittite specialist Carl Georg von Brandenstein went on to work with speakers of a number of Australian languages in Western Australia. At a time when the dominant paradigms in linguistics were either Chomskyan reductionism or writing a grammar to the exclusion of textual material, Carl followed his own direction, producing substantial collections of texts and recordings in Ngarluma, Yindjibarndi, Nyiyaparli, Ngadju and Noongar, as well as information about a number of other Australian languages. Part of his motivation was to obtain examples to reconstruct what he considered to be the original human language that diffused to all corners of the world, so he put some effort into comparing Australian languages with the classical languages he had previously studied.
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ItemTrust and Cooperation through Social Media(Routledge, 2022-02-23)
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ItemFrequency Effects in Chinese Learners’ Acquisition of the English Article Construction(Springer Nature Singapore, 2022)The current study, built on the usage-based approach to language, investigated frequency effects in Chinese learners’ acquisition of English articles. We carried out type and token frequency analysis of article usages in academic written essays sourced from a written English corpus of Chinese learners. We adopted an existing usage-based article cue coding scheme, which allowed us to implement a refined frequency analysis of all form-function mappings in learner texts. Our findings suggested that learners’ article usage follows the Zipfian distribution in terms of token frequency. Learners show a heavier reliance on a very limited number of high-frequency cues than native speakers. Non-definites (indefinite article and zero article) outnumber definite articles in terms of token and type frequency in learner texts. Yet definite articles show a significantly higher type/token ratio than non-definites, suggesting that learners develop a more complex and heterogeneous profile of definite article usage. We argue for more research and pedagogical attention to frequency and complexity effects in the acquisition of articles.
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ItemThe M Word. O del perché alcune parole vadano lasciate alla storia(Universitas Studiorum, 2022)
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ItemThe use of translation in international organizations(WALTER DE GRUYTER & CO, 2004-01-01)
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ItemTranslation Studies Should Help Solve Social Problems(Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 2003)It is proposed that the main tasks of Translation Studies should be to help solve certain social problems. This may provide a model of interdisciplinarity where the definition of problems precedes and orients the many disciplines that may be used to solve them. It is suggested that suitable problems may be recognized in terms of three ethical criteria: 1) the possible solutions should concern linguistic mediation, 2) the aim should be to promote cooperation between cultures, and 3) the problems should proceed from social disagreements. It is hoped that application of these criteria will protect the interdiscipline from excessive instrumentalization.
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ItemAlternatives to borders in translation theory(Rodopi, 2003)