School of Languages and Linguistics - Research Publications
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Item[Review of the book] Concrete flowers: a novel, by Wilfried N'Sonde (translated by Karen Lindo)(Taylor and Francis Group, 2021-10-02)
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ItemNo Preview Available‘L’Identité antillaise de Frantz Fanon, selon Raphaël Confiant’(Presses universitaires des Antilles, 2021-01-04)This article will examine the dual Antillean-Algerian identity of Frantz Fanon, as imagined by Raphaël Confiant in L’Insurrection de l’âme : Frantz Fanon, vie et mort du guerrier-silex (2017). Confiant describes the text as an imagined autobiography of Fanon because it combines a third-person, factual account of Fanon’s career as a psychiatrist in Algeria with more personal reflections about his Antillean childhood, recounted from the perspective of the imagined ‘I’. In the text Confiant emphasizes Fanon’s role in the Antillean resistance, an underexplored episode of Fanon’s life which nevertheless was crucial in the formation of his anticolonial thought. The article will analyse the literary techniques Confiant uses to highlight Fanon’s great sacrifice, while also arguing that the text is a salient example of the concept of ‘nœuds de mémoire’ by Debarati Sanyal, Max Silverman and Michael Rothberg. The Caribbean and Algerian memories of Fanon’s life and work do not compete with each other; rather, they complement each other.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableModernism and Identity: The Subject of Madame Bovary(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021)This article reads Flaubert's Madame Bovary as a work of 'modernist pedagogy': whereas recent readers, such as Rancière, and Vallury in MLN 134:4, understand Flaubert as an author of disidentification and impersonality, I read his work in terms of a dynamic of disidentification and reidentification, drawing on contemporary theories of 'practical identity' (Korsgaard, Hägglund). Flaubert's modernist pedagogy disidentifies the reader's immersion in the fictional world so as to promote reflection on the self-defeating ways in which his characters define themselves, and solicits this reader's cultivation of a reflexive attitude towards identity as a revisable and social activity, beyond the failings of identity Madame Bovary depicts.
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ItemLanguage contact in North Sulawesi: Preliminary observations(Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa （ILCAA）, 2020-03-31)Categorised as a Pidgin Derived Malay ( PDM ), Manado Malay ( MM ) is spoken throughout northern Sulawesi and on islands to the south of the southern Philippines. After originally functioning as regional lingua franca, it is now well established as the first language of up to one million people. This paper examines the language-contact situation between MM and two indigenous languages with a long presence in the region. Despite centuries of continued close contact, an examination of a range of typological features reveals minimal shared features, almost none of which have arisen through borrowing. These results corroborate multiple theories relating to language-contact outcomes, in particular the availability of different structural features for borrowing, the likely direction of any transfer, and the effect of both linguistic and non-linguistic factors on the potential for intense bilingualism.
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ItemLocational pointing in Murrinhpatha, Gija, and English conversations(JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING CO, 2021-12-31)Abstract It has been suggested that the gestural accuracy used by speakers of Australian Aboriginal languages like Guugu Yimidhirr and Arrernte to indicate directions and represent topographic features is a consequence of absolute frame of reference being dominant in these languages; and that the lackadaisical points produced by North American English speakers is an outcome of relative frame being dominant in English. We test this claim by comparing locational pointing in contexts of place reference in conversations conducted in two Australian Aboriginal languages, Murrinhpatha and Gija, and in Australian English spoken by non-Aboriginal residents of a small town in north Western Australia. Pointing behaviour is remarkably similar across the three groups and all participants display a capacity to point accurately regardless of linguistic frame of reference options. We suggest that these speakers’ intimate knowledge of the surrounding countryside better explains their capacity to accurately point to distant locations.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableEnhancing and priming at a voir dire: can we be sure the judge reached the right conclusion?(TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2021-03-04)Recent research has raised concerns about legal procedures for admitting ‘enhanced’ versions of indistinct covert recordings used as evidence in Australian criminal trials. This paper seeks to deepen these concerns via an experimental study using two enhancements that were admitted in a trial on the grounds that the judge, listening personally, considered they assisted him to hear words from the prosecution transcript more clearly than he could in the original. Results demonstrate that, as in previous studies, the apparent clarity of the ‘enhanced’ audio depends on listeners having been primed by a transcript. However, this study goes further, by demonstrating that the two enhancements are not neutral, incremental improvements on the original, but incorporate unnoticed artefacts that cause them to be perceived differently from the original, and from each other. These effects were not acknowledged by the judge, who endorsed the prosecution’s assurance that the enhancements had simply increased the clarity of the audio. Of course, the aim here is not to single out one particular judge, but to demonstrate that current procedures for admitting transcripts and enhancements are insufficient to protect judges, juries and defendants from potentially misleading interpretation of indistinct covert recordings.
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ItemReflections on software and technology for language documentation( 2020-01-01)Technological developments in the last decades enabled an unprecedented growth in volumes and quality of collected language data. Emerging challenges include ensuring the longevity of the records, making them accessible and reusable for fellow researchers as well as for the speech communities. These records are robust research data on which verifiable claims can be based and on which future research can be built, and are the basis for revitalization of cultural practices, including language and music performance. Recording, storage and analysis technologies become more lightweight and portable, allowing language speakers to actively participate in documentation activities. This also results in growing needs for training and support, and thus more interaction and collaboration between linguists, developers and speakers. Both cutting-edge speech technologies and crowdsourcing methods can be effectively used to overcome bottlenecks between different stages of analysis. While the endeavour to develop a single all-purpose integrated workbench for documentary linguists may not be achievable, investing in robust open interchange formats that can be accessed and enriched by independent pieces of software seems more promising for the near future.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableTranshispanic Food Cultural Studies: Defining the Subfield(Taylor and Francis Group, 2020)This introductory article argues for making food central to a praxis of cultural studies in the transhispanic world and the importance of inserting Hispanist voices into the arena of food studies scholarship more broadly. Articles in this Special Issue illustrate that foodways of the transhispanic world are heterogeneous and conflicted. Yet, food discourses allow us to study how people think with food, using it to mark identities, to establish power relationships and to dispute them. Articles in this collection demonstrate how transnational forces condition the food cultures and discourses of this context. They also highlight culinary nationalism and the inextricable links communities and nation-states construct and sustain between food and national cuisines from within and outside of nation-states or state-less nations. Both critical frameworks, the transnational—which engages imperial expansion, neocolonialism, globalization and migration—, and the national—in which foodways change in the context of intercultural encounters, are essential to understanding food cultures and their discursive and textual forms in this context.
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ItemNo Preview Available[Review of the Book] Sally Harvey. Carpentier’s Proustian Fiction: The Influence of Marcel Proust on Alejo Carpentier. Tamesis, 1994. Pp. 177. ISBN-10 : 1855660342.(Antipodas: Journal of Hispanic and Galician studies, 2021-10-21)
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ItemSchematic diagrams in second language learning of English prepositions: a behavioral and event-related potential study(Cambridge University Press (CUP), 2020-09-01)In the current study of applied cognitive linguistics (CL), schematic diagrams that represent generalizations of physical-spatial experience were applied in a computer-based tutor that trained English prepositions for second language (L2) learners. Behavioral and electrophysiological (ERP) measures were used to examine whether schematic-diagram feedback provided by the tutor had an instructional advantage over the minimally informed correctness feedback. Behavioral results confirmed this prediction and further revealed that the treatment difference was more striking when the participants had a lower L2 proficiency. The ERP results also supported the prediction. Violation uses of prepositions yielded an N270 and an N400. Schematic-diagram feedback motivated significant changes in brain potentials, whereas correctness feedback failed to do so. Overall, our findings suggest that CL-inspired instruction of a relatively short duration led to significant improvements in learners’ behavioral productive performance and in their sensitivity to semantic violation of preposition use during online sentence processing. The study provided strong neurolinguistic evidence for CL-inspired pedagogy in supporting L2 learning.